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Whither, e-Governance?

This blog is part of a series on the rollout and progress of e-Governance in India. 

Last week, the Government of Karnataka announced that it would make the Aadhar number compulsory through legislation. The government said that its draft law would be modelled after the ones enacted in Maharashtra, Gujarat and Haryana.

I have been walking the tightrope on Aadhar since the time it was introduced. I see on the one hand, the possibility of using a unique identity number for easing the process of obtaining a multitude of services from the government. Yet, I also see that the premature linking of Aadhar to various services by bureaucrats and politicians driven callous by their ambition, has led to many tragedies in the lives of the poor. Stories abound of distraught parents being unable to admit their children to school under the Right to Education Act, because they did not get their Aadhar numbers in time. There have also been instances of ration shops being unable to distribute rations because the lack of connectivity does not enable them to update the central database, which uses Aadhar, to record the rations given to individual card holders. We even watch mutely with horror at the recent report that a child, bereft of an Aadhar card, starved to death for lack of ration.

Looking beyond the current grim reality that faces many – particularly the poor – there is the not so remote possibility that an illiberal, malafide government that cares little for democratic freedoms, might use the Aadhar to conduct surveillance of a magnitude that cannot be imagined. This would be a horror scenario where dissidents may be electronically confined, with their bank accounts and credit cards frozen, their properties seized, their conversations tapped, their emails read and who knows their physical location tracked so that assassins can pick their time and place to pick them off.  

Let us suspend for a moment, our scepticism and fear about a leviathan government running us into slavery through its ability to snoop over all of us, and look closely at what the Karnataka Government promises, in return for making Aadhar compulsory. The reports say that an Aadhar based platform created by the Central government, named the DigiLocker, will be adopted by the state. This will enable citizens to store all their critical documents in their own virtual locker in cyber space, thereby obviating the need for documents to be stored physically. Therefore, citizens will be able to keep virtual copies of their caste and income certificates, ration cards and other essential documents, in a secure space on the Cloud. The citizen, when applying for a government service that requires some of these essential documents, will be able to give access to the relevant government department to dip into the DigiLocker, extract the document required and issue whatever it is that they want. Thus, physical documents will not be necessary.

I have no doubt that all that is promised will become possible in the near future. However, the question is whether such innovations will make the government more responsive and accountable to the people. There, I have no reason to be optimistic.

Karnataka has had a long history of innovation in the digital sphere. The state established a Government Computer Centre in the early 1970s and has, since then, spearheaded several reforms in governance, using the possibilities of e-Governance. It filled one with pride to walk through the centre in those early days; with their whirring mainframe computers maintained in sterile, air conditioned environments. As a government officer serving in the state, in the mid-1980s itself, I had an opportunity to be trained in the government computer centre; an opportunity that was possibly not available to other service colleagues in other states. I remember how I was completely absorbed in the training, learning the possibilities of using Lotus 123 and MSDos, the pre-Microsoft offerings for spreadsheet and documentation. I remember the similar thrill that I felt when I opted for an early bird training in the centre in the mid-1990s, to familiarise myself with the first offerings of Windows. In terms of years, that was a mere two decades back; but it could be eons in the past, considering the strides that have been made since then in the capabilities of computers and software.

Yet, one thing remains constant; the Karnataka Government does not seem to have made any significant improvement in its responsiveness to people. True, certain things have dramatically changed, such as the accessibility and availability of land records, but in other ways, the state remains as non-transparent as it used to be.

This ought not to be construed as a criticism of Karnataka’s government, which is possibly much better off than that of other states. Yet, this dichotomy within the government, of a certain indifference and unresponsiveness that continues in spite of remarkable successes in streamlining certain self-contained processes, lingers. Indeed, Karnataka could be an excellent case study of this kind of widespread schizophrenia that affects other governments too.

Thus the question- wither e-Governance?

I will reflect more on this in my next few blogs.  

From an IAS Officer’s perspective

Sanskriti Jain is presently a Sub-Divisional Magistrate in Rewa, Madhya Pradesh. In the conversation below, she shares her experience of working as an IAS officer and offers some rare insights from the field. 

What motivated you to look at a career in bureaucracy?

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 I was not exclusively thinking about joining the bureaucracy in the beginning, but my experiences in policy making made me realise that this was a very good way to connect to people and serve the country. Being an IAS officer is a coveted and difficult job. When one is going in for the exam, we have lofty   ideas of the transformative impact we are going to have. What is to be remembered after is that the power and position that we hold has a consequence;   even a small decision creates a big impact.

 The chance to shoulder this responsibility drove me to give the exam. I am now accountable for a Sub-Division. I take care of issues as diverse as land   administration, implementation of education schemes, and how the governance structure is performing. The range of job requirements and a chance to serve   the country is what I now look forward to.

 What is a major governance challenge you have encountered?    

Governance depends a lot on the society that one is part of. Understanding what stakeholders- the people, people’s representatives, business interests, different arms of the government – want is critical. The main challenge here is complexity because of the stakeholders involved and how participative they are. For instance, in India, this is why some states are doing well, while others are not. Local governance bodies such as Panchayats depend on the participative spirit and which shows how they function at the grassroots level.

Since a one-shoe-fits-all approach does not also fit governance, in my experience, governance in India depends on the person responsible for implementation. This is how you see transformation through policies. The motivations of the person is key. At the micro-level, the person is part of a system which administers many major schemes and more sub-schemes. Connecting different people and bridging gaps on what they want (much like a manager’s role) is what this role demands.

Do you see your department changing to development needs?

I’ll quote a senior officer who once told me this – if you were to imagine a small wheel and a big wheel, then the big wheel moving faster than the small one can derail the entire system. It seems from the outside that the administrative structure is not addressing needs, but the actual situation for officers like me is more complicated. At my level, the bureaucracy is changing. We are using new technologies such as WhatsApp groups for instantaneous communication on administrative needs. We have weekly monitoring sessions and targets to achieve. Yet, if we try to do too much in a short span of time, the society will go off the rails. There are factors involved in governance other than the administrative system.

For example, there was a huge fire in fields around some villages. We had informed people to seek safe ground. We still couldn’t prevent 3 young children from dying, not because of the fire but because upper castes did not accept them for safety. These social dynamics also determine how much the government system can push for change both within the system and in the society it is operating in.

Can you share a memory that has touched you in your career as a bureaucrat?

As a trainee IAS officer I was entrusted with the Ujwala Yojana which provides cooking gas to households. I remember talking to one woman, an Anganwadi cook, who wanted to use wood. She had doubts that the cylinder would burst and was fearful of using it. This was an interesting experience because we had to convince her to use the gas cylinder and that it was safe. We ultimately made available over 64,000 cylinders across the districts!

We want to hear from you! Write to us at [email protected] if you would like to share your experience of being an IAS officer. 

#2: Whither, e-Governance?

This blog is part of a series on the rollout and progress of e-Governance in India. 

I had concluded my last blog with the thought that in spite of measures to streamline government processes through e-Governance, there is a certain unresponsiveness and indifference that continues to linger. So why does the government live in parallel worlds, nay, centuries? Why do some people in the government dazzle us with visions of a cashless, paperless future in which we breeze through life with nary a thought to the burdens of transacting with the government, while on the other hand, the same dusty rooms, with piles of files, the same rudeness, confusion and corruption assault us daily when we visit a typical government office?

Maybe the answers lie in history.

Now that I am old enough to bore everybody with my reminiscences, I think back to my early days in the government, where with the same revolutionary zeal that I see in younger government officers one set about to streamline government systems. Computers were unknown in the mid-1980s in most government offices, not to speak of connectivity. In the small town where I started my career in the government, we were served by a manual telephone exchange, with a jolly man (whom I never did meet in person) at the other end who would connect us to the outside world. A lightning call, which meant that one did not have to wait for an outstation call – sometimes the wait could be a day or more – cost a lot of money. Yet, the friendly telephone man connected government offices with each other without charging us the exorbitant lightning call fee. By the year end, he was helpful enough to connect me to my wife in Bangalore instantly, whilst charging me ordinary rates. On one memorable occasion – New Year’s Eve it was – he enabled me to play an Elvis love song to my wife, oh so far away. That must have been a first of sorts, for lightning calls.

Yes, that telephone man caused a considerable revenue leakage in the telecom department by misclassifying calls. I do hope the laws of limitation apply and arrears are not deducted from his pension with usurious interest by some nit-picking auditor.

It was the typewriter and the stenographers who were our window to speed and efficiency. Luckily, I was served quite well by efficient stenographers throughout my official life; the first ones engineered the transition from my monochrome English dominated persona to someone who could swear as fluently in Kannada, and what is more, dictate court judgments in it. It helped that I had learnt typewriting formally; so on the rare occasions when a document needed to be typed in English, I could step in as well. One, from the pair of stenographers that I had, assured me that if I did not know the Kannada equivalent for a particular official term, I could use the English term and she would immediately tell me the Kannada equivalent. That was the most efficient language class that I ever took; except that my familiarity with stilted official language rarely used by ordinary people, made my informal conversations in Kannada seem like I was a government circular come to life.

Speeding up decision making by just having the decisions typed out faster was, as they say nowadays, a win-win situation. My office’s arrears in disposal of court cases came down dramatically and what’s more, one of my efficient stenographers married the clerk looking after my court cases.

The first desktop computers came into the Government Computer Centre in the late 1980s. I was one of the first people to opt for a training programme. It was fascinating; one was instantly hooked. We speak of the era before the emergence of software suites for Office; one prepared documents and performed simple sums on spreadsheets, directly with the blinking cursor on the black screen. One memorised the various key combinations for operations and that enabled one to get by.

In the meantime, the winds of change were blowing through the offices of private secretaries of senior officers. The electronic typerwriter; a curious hybrid between a typewriting keyboard and electronically assisted punching of the typefaces onto paper, began to make their appearance. They were horrendously expensive and their ribbon cartridges were not designed to reduce one’s revenue budgets.

Yet, in spite of these tentative first steps, the objective still remained that government offices ought to become more efficient. As desktop computers began to be part of the official landscape, a few laypersons in the government began to realise that they could be used for something more than mere typewriting. To fully utilise the potential of computers to improve one’s efficiency, a few enthusiasts – one cannot term them as computer experts – began to experiment with something more than mere typing.

What after the No Detention Policy and Continuous Comprehensive Evaluation?

The focus of education policymakers on outcomes, especially learning outcomes, is steadily rising. This is the second blog in a blog series to discuss paradigm shifts in the field of assessments in India’s public education system.

2017 has been an exciting year in the field of public education in India. Several important policy changes have been introduced with respect to assessments. Two of these have been the scrapping of the No Detention Policy (NDP) and the Continuous Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE) by the CBSE. In this blog, I briefly discuss what these are, their implementation story, where we stand today with respect to these policies, and the questions bringing in these changes have thrown up vis a vis improving learning levels of students.  

What is the No Detention Policy and the Continuous Comprehensive Evaluation?

The No Detention Policy (NDP) saw light of day when the Right to Education Act (2009) was implemented. Under Section 16 of the Act, schools were prohibited from detaining or expelling any student up to standard 8. Moreover, schools were required to remove the oft dreaded end term examinations. The annual examination pattern, it was argued, put undue pressure on students to rote memorise the entire syllabi, which stunted a student’s capacity to understand and apply concepts. Another criticism was that such exams made scoring high marks in tests among the primary goals of education.

The end term examination pattern was to be replaced with a new pattern of testing called Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE). Under this, schools were to test students periodically throughout the year, using a mix of written and activity-based assessments, on what they were actually learning. The idea was to equip the teacher with useful feedback regarding her student so she could tailor her inputs according to the pupil. The CCE pattern was also designed to assess other aspects of a student’s education such as creative skills and emotional development. Thus, CCE was conceived to put the focus again on student learning. 

Transition from traditional assessment patterns to NDP and CCE

It did not take long for the impact of these policies to become visible. Dropout rates reduced drastically in the years following the implementation of the RTE Act. However, concerns soon started emerging from states across the country. Schools began to complain about students not taking their studies seriously because exams had been scrapped and they would still be able to graduate to the next standard irrespective of their learning. Several teachers and principals even admitted to becoming lax about what students in elementary classes were learning. Moreover, CCE report cards, an important assessment tool, were not taken seriously since department-level inquiries about the content of these reports were rare.

The transition to the CCE pattern of assessments was anything but smooth and was marred by resistance, fuelled by the harsh reality of working in public schools. The kind of individual attention that teachers were required to give under the CCE mode of teaching and assessment was viewed as unfeasible because of poor teacher-to-student ratio, lack of classrooms, and other resource constraints. The time spent by teachers on reporting back on the CCE – often multiple times in a year – was also seen as an impediment, eating into their teaching time.

The present situation

In 2015, a Sub-Committee was created to look into the issues surrounding the CCE and NDP. Based on the feedback given by states, they issued several recommendations which would require amending the RTE Act (2009). A number of these were accepted by the Union Cabinet in August 2017. In the Winter Session of Parliament this year, the ‘Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (Second Amendment) Bill, 2017’ will be tabled which, if passed, will bring about important changes in the Act with respect to NDP. The proposed amendments are as follows:

  1. The provision to not detain students until completion of elementary education will be amended. Central or state governments will be able to allow schools to hold back students in standards 5 and 8, or in both classes.
  2. Regular exams will be held for students in standards 5 and 8 every year. If students fail these exams, they will be given additional lessons and a chance to reappear for the exams.
  3. If the students fail the re-examination, they may be held back in standards 5, 8, or in both classes. The central or state government will also be empowered to decide the manner and conditions under which students may be held back. 

The CBSE has scrapped CCE assessments from its schools and introduced a fixed, uniform marking pattern for standards 6 to 9. It has also reintroduced board exams for standard 10. Several state boards, however, continue on the CCE pattern in curtailed form for standards uptil standard 8.

Will reverting back to the old mode of assessments improve learning?

The present Bill, expected to be tabled in Parliament soon, explicitly links the move to scrap the NDP with the goal of improved learning:

‘In the “Statement of Objects and Reasons” for introducing the amendments, it is stated that “…in order to improve the learning outcomes in the elementary classes and after     wide deliberations with all the stakeholders, it is proposed to substitute section 16 so as to empower the appropriate Government to take a decision as to whether to hold back a child in the fifth class or in the eighth class or in both classes, or not to hold back a child in any class, till the completion of elementary education.”’

Annual exams (and the importance given to final test scores) are going to return. There are various questions staring policy makers. Firstly, are the moves to reintroduce the concept of detaining students and scrapping or heavily modifying the CCE contradicting the policy objective of improving learning? Secondly, will reverting to the previous exam pattern be able to address the issue of rote memorisation this time around?

Through anecdotal evidence we know that most teachers preferred the old assessment pattern. They firmly believe that students will learn only if they fear the teacher and failing exams.

Presently, large scale policy changes are taking place in the field of assessments, all with the goal to improve learning. In the previous blog of this series, my colleague Mridusmita threw light on how the National Achievement Survey (NAS) was pitched differently this year to ensure that state and national plans are designed keeping actual learning achievements in mind. Moreover, a new concept called Learning Outcomes (which will be discussed in the next blog by my colleague Taanya) has been introduced across the country which may have far reaching implications in how assessments are viewed in India’s public education system.

Yet, even as these new changes are being introduced, have policy makers learnt a lesson from the CCE experience? CCE was introduced to help teachers tailor inputs and assess students periodically such that students actually learn. The implementation of the CCE, however, only taught us that the system was not equipped to handle this change. This raises some critical questions. Have the limitations of implementing CCE (such as resource constraints faced by schools, and capacity of teachers to implement CCE in letter and spirit) been adequately addressed such that these new changes yield positive results? The answers will only shape up in the years to come.

Swachh Bharat Mission (Gramin) 3 Years On

October 2 this year marked the third anniversary of the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM), the Government of India’s (GoI) flagship programme to achieve the goal of total sanitation by 2019. In the discussion below, Avani Kapur and Devashish Deshpande give us a sense of the reality on the ground for Swachh Bharat Mission (Gramin).

With only two more years to go to meet targets, what are we seeing as priorities for Swachh Bharat Mission (Gramin)? Have they changed?

Devashish: Let us state upfront that there are in fact two ways of discerning priorities. The first is what the officially stated government priority is – available through the programme norms and guidelines. But there is also the priority that gets translated on the ground – what has been carried forth by implementers based on their own capacity and understanding. There is often a significant gap between the two. The recently released, updated implementation guidelines indicate that the priorities of the mission are witnessing a forceful reorientation towards the initial ideal of a community-led, sustainable movement. These revisions also seem to address several of the concerns raised by media and civil society and signal the right intentions.

More specifically, the guidelines include detailed instructions on the monitoring and verification protocol, as well as administrative capacity issues like manpower and trainings. They are also more focussed on the sustainability of the ODF (Open Defecation Free) status beyond mission activities , such as, what is being called ODF ++; issues related to toilet technology; and the need for greater attention to behaviour change with interpersonal communication as a means of bridging the access usage gap.

These are not new focal areas but a more explicit statement of principles the mission has always espoused. That they are reinforced three years into the five-year mission period suggests that the Centre sees the gaps in the programme, and is urging mid-term course correction. However, in the context of the current push to meet targets within a specified deadline, unless we find ways to strengthen implementation, there is a danger that these guidelines and principles will dissipate as they travel along the bureaucratic channels to the ground.

The government has consistently maintained that the objective of the mission is not only construction but behaviour change. With seven states already declared ODF and others striving for the status, do we have data available on toilet usage?

Devashish: This is the biggest gap in the existing monitoring framework of the sanitation sector. As we mentioned last year, collecting usage data is complicated, and quantitative data in this regard is often unreliable. At present the NSSO (National Sample Survey Office at the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation) is an important source of toilet usage numbers. However, their approach to capturing it is fraught with problems.

For example, the wording of the question itself is a concern. It asks whether ‘members are using latrine’. This comes across at once as leading and accusatory and is likely to bias the respondent into answering in the affirmative. Further, no attempt is made to talk to other members of the household and verify what the respondent answers on their behalf. As RICE institute also notes, how you ask the question, whom you ask, how many times you ask, all have implications on the answer. There are also seasonal variations – usage tends to change during the rainy seasons, for example. We ourselves faced this problem in our survey when we got different answers to the question – where do you normally go versus where did you go today!

Avani: The other, more current source of tracking usage is the Swachh Survekshan, conducted annually by the Quality Council of India on behalf of the central government.  Here too, however, the same shortcomings can be noted. Their approach is even more curtailed and they only ask the respondent ‘does any member (of the household) defecate in the open sometimes?’

The implications of this approach are evident from numerous stories on the gaps between access and usage. The concern that ODF Panchayats are not truly ODF has been flagged by AI and others previously. Recognising this, the guidelines have laid out a detailed monitoring and verification process and need for continued engagement with ODF Panchayats and villages after declaration, rewards for Panchayats that perform well, and other measures to ensure that official declarations do not become an end in themselves. Moreover, this time the guidelines focus on the use of independent qualitative studies in order to ascertain the status of usage. This is definitely a positive step. More focus needs to be given to collecting regular, independent data through different methods on tracking usage and compliance to policy.

For more on toilet construction under Swachh Bharat Mission (Gramin), the status of awareness raising for behaviour change, and challenges to the programme, visit: Centre for Policy Research. 

Making Evidence-Based Policies a Reality

Recently, some colleagues and I at the Accountability Initiative conducted a day long workshop with a batch of development management students. The emphasis was on relaying the message that in order to become better development practitioners in the future they must use credible research findings to inform their decisions. After concluding the session, a student came to me with a set of questions which she was obviously feeling shy about posing.

She said she had understood the importance of looking at evidence to inform her practice, but had no idea where to begin looking for it! “Which journals should I look at? Where do I look for these journals? No one has ever taught me this,” said this young woman with a couple of years of experience of working closely with migrant labourers. I was struck by her comments. It made me think back to my own experiences of working with government officials, and reflect on how wide the gap is between development practitioners and researchers.

Today, calls for “evidence-based policy making,” “data driven policies” are increasingly getting louder in development circles. This is a positive sign. Policy making processes in the Government have been notoriously opaque. Often driven by political priorities of ruling parties, policies are shaped under imperfect conditions- administrators have very little time to formulate the policies; and they have to work with limited knowledge about the scale of the issues.  As a result, policies and programmes tend to leave a lot of questions unanswered for both frontline implementers and the public which is ultimately at the receiving end. So, more demands for sound policies backed by evidence are and should be welcomed by all.

That brings us to the next stage – supplying the evidence. This is where some big set of questions and challenges lie for everyone involved in policy making and implementation. Who is producing the evidence? How is it being produced? How is this evidence being treated and absorbed in the policy cycle?

Hunt for reliable evidence

We find ourselves in a predicament. On the one hand, there’s plenty of meaningful research going on in universities which can directly inform and enrich policy making and implementation. But this research is not always tailored to answer or solve particular policy related questions. This is because universities in general do not orient students to look at their projects in that light.

On the other hand, there’s a dearth of research, particularly on niche, sector specific issues, where policy planners could really use all the help. I will attribute this mainly to the fact that practitioners – people who are working in non-government and government organisations who plan and implement crucial programmes daily – simply don’t have the time to share their sectoral expertise. They cannot afford to spare a lot of time to weave in further research in their plan cycle, so important issues that merit further study don’t easily come to see the light of day.

Moreover, development practitioners – people who could really find it beneficial to dip into the pool of knowledge universities are sitting on – tend to scoff at trained researchers for being too theoretical, impractical or idealistic. Seeped in jargon, academic studies are quite often by and for academic consumption. This need not always be the case.

That the Government has several research bodies producing high quality research, which is used by national and state level planners to make plans, is unchallenged. But the dearth of high quality non-government sources of evidence is not healthy. Like in the case of any monopoly, when there is a dearth of competition, users don’t have an option but to go by what is on offer.

Absorption and application of evidence in the policy cycle

When practitioners are inclined to look for evidence, a simple Google search may not be very helpful to begin with since it may throw up hundreds of unverifiable results. In my experience, practitioners, more often than usual, don’t have the bandwidth to sift through all the research, and assess its quality.

So even while there is talk of incorporating evidence into the policy cycle, one must ask what is being done to build the capacity of planners to leverage what is already available. Where to begin looking for the evidence; how to assess credibility of the data; how to do basic interpretation of data and its application – these are areas that all development practitioners should get basic training on to help them discharge their duties better.

Need to bridge the gap between evidence builders and users

The onus of addressing these gaps lies with both practitioners and researchers. Both evidence builders and evidence users must reach out and create platforms to further the dialogue. The question then becomes – what can such platforms and formats for engagement look like? We need to urgently start asking and addressing these questions if we don’t want “evidence-based policy making” to remain empty rhetoric.

 

The Key to Success in the IAS

This blog is part of a series on leadership in the Indian bureaucracy and is based on the experiences of senior bureaucrats. The previous blog can be found here. 

From the examples of Kurien and Vijaykumar related in earlier blogs, are there any trends that emerge, as to what the qualities are, which equip an IAS officer for success, or is it dictated by environmental factors such as the circumstances of the positioning of the officer or the political climate?

Clearly, longevity is an important factor in the effectiveness of both officers. Kurien and Vijaykumar lasted long in their defining postings, in the case of the former, as the head of the Kochi International Airport and in the latter, as the head of the Girijan Cooperative Corporation and later on, the Poverty Eradication Mission. The assurance of a secure tenure enabled both officers to think in the long term and stay long enough to execute their plans. Another commonality between Kurien and Vijaykumar was that both entered into relatively new organisations, or those with expanding responsibilities, and had few legacy issues to deal with. In the case of Kurien, he was able to define processes to tune with the priorities he set himself. While in the case of Vijay, relatively speaking, he entered into organisations where processes were already begun to be established, he still had the latitude to change them to adapt to the steep growth path on which these organisations were moving.

The question is then, whether such longevity is a purely fortuitous matter and that therefore, the effectiveness of officers is largely a matter of luck; of how long they manage to stay in a particular position. In answer, there is still the matter of luck that prevails; both spent considerable periods of time at their defining jobs and that helped them make their mark.

Yet, if one looks closer, a stable tenure is not dependent merely on luck alone. It is possible for officers to create their own luck, through their quick grasp of the core requirements of the jobs they hold. In other words, both Kurien and Vijaykumar, unwittingly or otherwise, became indispensable to their organisations. They did so by gaining so much knowledge about the environment in which they worked, as also the processes they needed to adopt to move forward, that their removal would have imperilled any future progress.

Politicians are perceptive people and they know that at the end of the day, they will be judged by the tangible progress they have demonstrated on the ground. Yet at the same time, in the current political scenario, politicians see as very valuable their powers of individual patronage. They see this as cementing their relationships with a vast body of political friends and interest groups who work in concert to ensure that politicians get elected. Thus, a dichotomy exists in the minds of most politicians when it comes to their preferences regarding officials posted in their constituencies. They want somebody both effective and obedient, and oftentimes, these two qualities are not compatible with each other.

In the case of both Kurien and Vijaykumar, in all probability, the levels of trust they developed within their organisations gave them an aura of invincibility that no politicians who might have been annoyed with any of their actions, would have liked to tackle.

Quite simply, Vijay and Kurien reached a stage of widely respected professional excellence that removing them would have had adverse political repercussions on any politician who might have contemplated moving them.

That both Kurien and Vijay were able to reach this bastion, is due to their own qualities of leading from behind, and their easy ability for teamwork. In the government, teamwork is often spoken about, but rarely practiced. Hierarchical command and control systems are both de-facto and de jure the preferred option. If Kurien and Vijay had conformed to this conventional model of being top down bosses, their premature movement would not have surprised anybody. However, the fact that both of them were able to forge teams, must have built the political aura of invincibility and indispensability around them, which would have made any politician who might have been annoyed with them and contemplated moving them, think twice.

Yet, success could cause jealousy, which is the biggest threat to officers who perform well. Jealousy rarely emerges from the political side; but it is rampant in the closed confines of the bureaucracy. Jealousy could be of anything – usually it is of the success of the officer – but it could be of publicity that the officer gains, his easy relationship with influential politicians, or even about the fact that he is ‘having a good time’.

The last mentioned reason may look frivolous, but it is a real and serious problem. Vijay spoke to me about a valuable forest produce, a nut (Strychnos potatorum) that had the unique property of being able to clarify and clean muddy water. There was a huge procurement of this product, but at one stage the market collapsed. Whilst undertaking research on improving the quality of the product, Vijay stumbled on the potential of using this nut for removing radioactive contamination from water. He engaged scientists for conducting research on this matter and as research progressed, he believed that testing by the International Atomic Energy Agency in France and Germany would settle the matter. However, when he sought permission to go abroad to arrange for and have this vital test conducted, jealousy intervened and he was not allowed to travel abroad.

He was attempting to have a ‘good time’, and that is sacrilege in the Government.

The views expressed are of the author only. 

 

A bureaucrat’s endeavours bear fruit

This blog is part of a series on leadership in the Indian bureaucracy and is based on the experiences of senior bureaucrats. The previous blog can be found here. 

With his stint in the Girijan Cooperative Corporation of Andhra Pradesh, T. Vijaykumar broke away from the depressing stereotype of a good officer who is in perpetual transition from post to post. With his keen interest in tribal development, Vijay is candid in admitting that he asked his senior in the General Administration Department for the post of Managing Director of the Girijan Cooperative Corporation. This was not considered a glamorous post, so Vijay got the position he wanted.

Vijay realised that the Corporation was motoring along, trading in the produce collected by tribals. Tenders were rigged; traders made the margins and the tribals anyway had little bargaining power and low expectations from the Corporation. Vijay was keen to increase the real incomes of the tribals the Corporation was set up to serve, but any face-to-face confrontation with  powerful trader interests would see his exit. Vijay began to study the market intensively, to go past the traders with the knowledge gained. He began to understand the huge price differentials that were dependent upon simple value addition techniques that tribal people could easily understand and implement. He initiated the concept of Community Coordinators, where young professionals from prime universities and institutes of technology spent 3 years in a tribal village working for holistic development.

The success of the Andhra Pradesh approach significantly contributed to the evolution of the national model, namely, the National Rural Livelihoods Mission. Vijay’s name was now synonymous with India’s rural poverty reduction approach.

The combination of good outreach and good knowledge had a huge beneficial impact of the tribals. Take the major product on which the Corporations commercial fortunes depended- Gum Karaya, an edible gum extracted from trees that was almost wholly exported. Vijay’s thrust on research, based on feedback from the market, resulted in a drive to improve handling of the gum at the level of tribal gum collectors. 80 botanists were hired to go into tribal areas to change the implements used by gum collectors and improving the practices of gum drying. GCCs storage facilities were improved, and shipping practices of Mumbai-based exporters changed for the better as well. At a modest investment of Rs 30 lakh, gum quality improved, tripling the prices realised by tribal gum collectors. It was a clear demonstration of how valuable research and an intimate knowledge of the market were in maximising price realisation. Vijay’s five year tenure from 1990-1995 ensured that the Girijan Cooperative Corporation transformed from a run-of-the-mill trading company to an institution that delivered substantial profit to tribal people.

Vijay’s next big break came when he moved in 2000, to head Andhra Pradesh’s Society for the Elimination of Rural Poverty, (SERP). The state-level society, set up as a special mission at arm’s length form the government in order to cut through red tape and work more efficiently, was implementing the state’s ambitious poverty reduction mission. The focus of the approach was to help poor women to organise themselves into self-help groups, where their thrift and credit activities would blossom into a substantial creation of wealth at their hands, through a basket of support ranging from training, to subsidies to set up businesses and improve skills. In the 10 years (2000 to 2010) that Vijay headed SERP, the poverty reduction programme went from strength-to-strength. The programme was expanded to cover all villages of the state and 1.15 crore rural poor women were enabled and assisted to form and run thrift and credit based self-help groups, which were federated into village, sub-district and district level organisations. As for wealth creation, the results were equally staggering. By March 2014, the self-help groups had cumulatively mobilised bank credit of Rs.65,000 crores in the undivided state of Andhra Pradesh.

The success of the Andhra Pradesh approach significantly contributed to the evolution of the national model, namely, the National Rural Livelihoods Mission. Vijay’s name was now synonymous with India’s rural poverty reduction approach. He moved to Delhi as Joint Secretary, Ministry of Rural Development and Mission Director, National Rural Livelihoods Mission (NRLM). He led the NRLM for 5 years, rolling out a nation-wide poverty eradication programme based on social mobilisation and empowerment of rural poor women. Over the next 10 to 15 years, this programme aims to reach out to 80 to 100 million rural poor households and stay engaged with these families till they emerge from abject poverty and enjoy a decent quality of life.

After he returned to Andhra Pradesh in 2015, Vijay took over as Special Chief Secretary of the Department of Agriculture & Cooperation. One of the significant achievements of the poverty reduction mission in Andhra Pradesh was the community managed sustainable agriculture (C.M.S.A) programme, through which women SHGs were assisted to take up collective farming. Vijay, based upon this success, turned his attention to low budget natural farming as a way to ensure livelihood and environmental sustainability. After his retirement, Vijay pursues his passion for improving the lot of the poor. The Andhra Pradesh government has appointed him as an Advisor on Agriculture and Cooperation, in charge of implementation of natural farming in the state. He is now involved in a programme of covering 5,00,000 farmers from 1,500 villages in the state to adopt ‘zero budget natural farming’ and reduce their cultivation costs and risks and increase their yields and incomes, even as soil fertility and quality of chemical free food improves.

The views expressed are of the author only. 

NAS 2017: A Much-Needed Move

The focus of education policymakers on outcomes, especially learning outcomes, is steadily rising. This is the first blog in a blog series to discuss paradigm shifts in the field of assessments in India’s public education system.

Today (13 November 2017) is a landmark day for India’s education sector as the largest ever learning assessment survey of students, formally known as the National Achievement Survey (NAS), is being rolled out across around 700 districts of the country. The move marks a paradigm shift in the public education policy of the country with the government attempting to focus on learning outcomes.

Why is NAS 2017 important?

Conducted by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), NAS 2017 will cover a sample of nearly 3.6 million children from 120,000 schools spread across all districts of India. Sample coverage of this magnitude thus makes it the largest ever sample survey conducted by the Indian government till date.

More importantly, the need for NAS 2017 has emerged from calls for a shift in the government’s role in education – away from the provision of school related inputs to improving the quality of learning. Measuring learning on a regular basis is the first step toward achieving this shift, and reflects the Ministry of Human Resource Development’s (MHRD) emphasis on ‘Learning for All’, not just ‘Education for All’.

NAS 2017 is unique in a number of ways. First, this is going to be an annual exercise starting from 2017 which is the first step in ensuring regular government monitoring of learning levels at the sub-national level. Second, learning level assessments will be done for three grades in the elementary level (III, V and VIII) every year on the same day unlike the previous rounds of NAS where a particular round used to focus on a single grade. Third, the sample of schools/students have been selected in such a manner that the findings will be representative at the district level, which will result in generation of district level reports on learning assessments. Fourth, NAS 2017 aims to ensure near real time data access. Answers to the tests will be captured through OMR (Optical Mark Recognition) sheets, which will be scanned and data will be captured in much lesser time. In fact, NCERT is expecting to generate district report cards within a month from now. Lastly, to derive an understanding of factors influencing learning, the survey is also going to capture some background indicators on students, teachers and schools through three questionnaires – Pupil Questionnaire (PQ), Teacher Questionnaire (TQ) and School Questionnaire (SQ).

How is the government planning to use NAS findings?

While earlier rounds of NAS broadly reflected learning levels for a state as whole, they did not provide enough ground level insights that could be utilised for diagnostic and feedback purposes to the local bureaucracy. As a result, these overall findings were not used for bringing improvement in the teaching-learning processes.This is precisely why NAS has been modified in 2017. NCERT has specifically mentioned in its guidelines that NAS findings will now be disseminated to the last mile (schools within each district) and different policy interventions would be taken up to improve the learning level of students, based on the NAS findings. To this end, NCERT has already conducted a national level workshop to finalise the guidelines for communicating the findings to the district level, and to identify ways to incorporate the required interventions in the annual district and state level education planning processes.

It is in this sense that NAS has the potential to move beyond being just a policy tool to also becoming a tool for accountability. Considering the role of ‘reliable, relevant, and regular’ data in impacting policies, there is thus hope that the NAS 2017 will be a game changer. However, for this to become reality, what must be guarded against is the danger that NAS is just another huge data collection exercise of the government.

For now, it is premature to know the exact impact of the NAS measures. However, in order to ensure its success,the government should put emphasis on making the NAS results accessible to the general public by focusing on increasing public awareness and publishing the findings and ideally also the raw data through different media (not only through an online portal as is the case till now). This will help ensure that the findings become a key information base for parents and the community members for demanding pedagogical accountability from education providers and the government.

In upcoming blogs, my colleagues Vincy and Taanya will discuss other recent developments in the field of assessments in education.