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The ABC of Indian bureaucracy – a primer

This is the first blog of a five-part series to unpack the meaning of some of the frequently heard terms and phrases in the Indian bureaucracy.

“Poora system hi corrupt hai!” is an all too familiar statement heard being muttered by actors from both within and outside the bureaucracy. This is a powerful, all-encompassing narrative which, to begin with, discredits the work of lakhs of individuals who are committed to public service. Moreover, every time we indulge in this line of thought we take a step away from having a meaningful engagement with the organisation that has been disproportionately tasked with the responsibility of executing and directing the fate of government policies.

Without an informed, meaningful engagement with the bureaucracy, how can we even begin to formulate the right questions to ask of people running the show? In this five-part blog series the Public Administration team at AI will attempt to shine a light on some the words one often hears being flung around in government offices, from the perspective of mid-level and front line government actors. By doing so we hope to unpack some of the factors that drive government officials at work, and touch upon a couple of root causes that add to the overarching narrative associated with the bureaucracy.

Administration in alphabetical order

The public bureaucracy, like any other organisation, has a vocabulary, work culture and an internal logic unique to itself. The following words may appear deceptively bland to the layperson but to a government official the symbolic and literal meanings associated with them is enough to legitimise most of their work practices! So without further ado, here is a list of frequently used words in bureaucratic corridors, pulled out from our field level experiences spanning seven Indian states.

In the course of this month, we will be sharing our experiences of what some of these words and phrases mean for stakeholders within the middle and lower levels of the bureaucracy[1] so watch out for these![2]

[1] For our purpose, we have defined the middle and lower or frontline bureaucracy in the following way:

Middle level bureaucracy – Permanent and semi-permanent government agencies tasked with oversight and administration of frontline agencies. They ensure proper implementation of government policies, programmes and rule compliance, and provide technical support to frontline actors. Physical proximity to public is usually lower and contact with them is less frequent compared to frontline agencies owing to location of offices and nature of the primary responsibilities.

Frontline bureaucracy – Permanent and semi-permanent government agencies tasked with interpreting, implementing state level policies and programmes. Physical proximity and frequency of contact with general public is consistently high compared to agencies at higher tiers of the bureaucracy.

[2] For an insight into the world of top level bureaucracy, do follow our resident expert, Mr. T.R Raghunandan’s blog – Raghu Bytes.

What makes for ‘Successful Implementation’?

If you asked the Government administrative machinery its point of view, they would likely report that the key to successful implementation is the flow of messages through the cascade, exactly as per plan. By that measure, Accountability Initiative (AI) has been extremely successful in its work with the managerial staff responsible for effective School Management Committees (SMC)[1] in Rajasthan. The State Project Director issued an order, which was reissued in some detail to the Directorate and Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan offices in the Bassi district. Following this, the District Education Officer put his Resource Persons (RP) in charge of implementation.

The RP in-charge of community mobilisation and the RP in-charge of monitoring took care to demonstrate their interest. They reached out immediately to the head teachers of the schools concerned through WhatsApp and phone calls to relay the message of our imminent arrival. In turn, the principals used every power vested in them to ensure warm and welcoming SMC meetings as per schedule – complete with tea and alu bhujia served to every SMC member they were able to track down the morning of the meeting. Technically speaking, access was granted. And, like many before us, and many who will follow, we bustled about our business busily, convinced of our clarity and of our purpose.

While AI was ticking off rapport building on its list of to-dos, the RPs used their well-healed experience to clear just enough time in their schedules to estimate the possible consequences of AI presence in their geography – a calculation based on the amount of influence they perceived we had, and the iron-grip they have over status quo. In other words, right there, in the first meeting, this cadre, held in place by a political warren connecting the cluster to the State, made a reliable prediction about the impact of our work.

What we learnt in the year to follow and what the RPs knew at the time, was that the effectiveness of an SMC as an accountability mechanism depends entirely on how it is constituted. Their elections are doctored to reflect the corrupted norms that rule local self-government. The transactional relationships between a highly politicised teaching community scattered carefully across clusters, with corresponding interests at the block and district level, collectively control the fate of reform implementation.

This elaborate, unmentionable, unrelenting web confines reform such that it does not significantly disturb the stakes. Head teachers implement picture-perfect election days attended by all the parents, and then some ‘respected’ elders of the community and announce a list of SMC executive committee members. Except that, parents come from families with children who have stayed in school. Protected by the rule that Rajasthan allows schools to keep students on their rolls without needing them to attend regularly (once in a three-week period is considered adequate), the most vulnerable families quickly drop out of local, education-related decision-making. And the list that the head teachers present to this rarefied group, is pre-approved by the political network in tandem with the block level administrators.

While clinical, densely invested pilots gasp for life as they face the mammoth immovable machinery that blocks innovation from crawling up to state policy or trickling down from elevated echelons, implementation is very often successful. Success is defined at the block level by the studied facade of meek, disenfranchised, seemingly cooperative officers, whose charge it is to maintain the machine’s power structures. By definition, it means that there is no lasting change.

Read my next blog about the role of school leaders in ‘successful implementation’.

[1] Accountability Initiative has been been working in the Bassi block in Rajasthan, to ascertain the challenges to the education management as it takes on the task of running effective SMCs. Of the many levels of education bureaucracy we work with, there are 6 principals of schools who are provided inputs on coaching SMCs on fiscal literacy.

How Honest is Honest?

Before one sets in place a system of 360 degree appraisal and expects it to work effectively, two pre-requisites have to be in place. First, there must be a shared understanding of what integrity is and second, there must be a culture of acceptance of honest criticism up the hierarchy. Both are sadly lacking in the government.

One of the key questions in the system of performance appraisal in the government – the Annual Confidential Report system – is regarding the integrity levels of the officer being appraised. This is the question for which the blandest answer is almost always the norm. The safest thing to do, as I have written before, is to write the words ‘Beyond reproach’, which usually translates into ‘What? I did not see that question’. Yes, while those appreciative but lacking in knowledge of grammar may write ‘fully integrated’, or the sneaky may write ‘he conducts experiments with the truth’, nobody writes things they might actually want to say, in that column.

Let’s explore the idea of a shared understanding of what comprises integrity in the government, a bit more by considering the scenarios described below.

An officer routinely uses his official car to go to a private club on the way home and stays there late, playing cards, whilst his driver waits outside, without being paid overtime.
Marshy government land, which is considered useless, is arranged to be granted to the club by the officer, to set up a golf course. Officers of the civil services are given fast track membership into the club, on the payment of a concessional fee.
An officer knows her minister is making money by interfering in postings and transfers of officials below her. The task of undertaking transfers has been always with officers, but slowly, the minister has taken over by demanding to see the files on transfers. The officer shrugs her shoulders, says that things have gone seriously wrong in the government, and looks away.
An officer working in the local government allows the members and corrupt engineers to make some money on contracts for roads, but on the tacit understanding that she be left alone to run a corruption free programme for supporting farmers with training and technical inputs for water harvesting. This in turn ensures that the officer is not moved out and that the programme benefits a large number of people.
An officer has a reputation for austerity and honesty of a high degree. Wherever the officer is posted, she investigates who is dishonest and proactively collects evidence against such people. She then submits petitions to higher level governments against such people. She often leaks such reports to the press and gains a reputation as a David, who slays the Goliaths of corruption. The problem is that she is transferred within a few months in each of her jobs and she never stays long enough to complete any of her missions.

I am not going to attempt to analyse or provide answers as to whether the behaviour of the protagonist in each situation comprises behaviour of high, or low integrity. However, these situations (and many more that are similar) paint a picture of many hues. We are led to realise that in reality, standards of integrity are not precise or universal, but are made up at the nick of the moment, as circumstances unravel.

It is not as if the government does not do anything to define standards of integrity. However, documents that aim to do so are usually verbose and vague. Typically, the conduct rules which lay down the rules for official and personal conduct of Government staff, do not keep pace with the circumstances of the day.

Catch all phrases such as ‘conduct unbecoming of an officer’ can be subjectively interpreted to apply personal biases as to what is acceptable and what is not, whilst judging an officer’s behaviour. For example, whilst arriving at one’s workspace in an inebriated state would be a definite no-no, drinking off hours in a private bar might, or might not, be considered as behaviour unbecoming of an officer. The exceptions to the rules are also capable of being widely misinterpreted. For instance, while the rule that an officer ought not to communicate with the media without permission is easy to understand and apply, the exception that applies to expressions that are of an artistic or literary nature has been used as a window to express oneself on social media. That would be fine if one were writing about one’s hobby or publishing a work of fiction, but when an officer of the government takes sides in a political argument through Facebook or Twitter, it might become decidedly iffy.

Clearly, it is safe for an appraising officer, whether in a supervisory capacity or in a subordinate role, to write that the officer being appraised is Beyond Reproach. Much safer than saying that he is a Rotten Egg.

Fiscal Decentralisation Debate: Why and How?

The debate started with a simple question: How does a society ensure that resources are distributed efficiently and equally to a diverse and heterogeneous society?

We take this question to leading economists and public finance theorists to find the rationale behind it.

Kenneth Arrow, Richard Musgrave, Paul Samuelson: In a democracy, the government is the custodian of my society’s interest and hence should be responsible for maximising my welfare.

James Buchanan: But, government agencies are guided by their own self-interests and are no different from individuals. So, it cannot be a single powerful agent seeking to maximize benefits for the society.

Richard Musgrave: However, the government need not be indivisible. There can be different levels where the highest level takes the responsibility of redistributing resources to keep the economy stable. This is important as mobile voters can reduce the potential of redistribution through the lower levels of government.

Wallace Oates: That being said, local level governments continue to play an important role among immobile voters as tastes and preferences vary across regions.

Charles Tiebout: Exactly, and to add there exists a class of goods called the ‘’local public goods’’ for which people effectively sort themselves into homogenous groups. Demands across groups vary and therefore I feel decentralized finance holds potential.

Mancur Olson: Smaller groups are likely to be better in attempting collective action as there is less incentive for free-riding at the cost of others. This is because they can be more easily detected. Also, large groups would face relatively high costs when attempting to organize collective action, as compared to local action by small groups. Plus, different levels of government can provide output of public goods whose benefits coincide with the geographical scope of that jurisdiction. And when a service or function can be delivered equally well or better at a lower level, then why do it at a higher level?

Wallace Oates: But hey, there can hardly exist a perfectly coincided jurisdiction with the geographical benefits of public goods. So, there will be spill-over benefits. But then I guess it is still better than uniform, centrally determined level of public outputs.

If we all agree on fiscal decentralisation as a way of better governance, then how should it be institutionalised?

Wallace Oates: If one level of government generates tax revenues in excess of its expenditures, then it can transfer the surplus to another level through inter-governmental grants and revenue sharing. Also, higher order government can give conditional¹ grants in the form of matching² grants where local services generate spill-over benefits for other jurisdictions.

Frank Flatters, J. Vernon Henderson, Peter Mieszkowski: True. Grants are also needed to correct migration patterns and provide desired assistance to poorer jurisdictions.

Wallace Oates: And, unconditional³ grants can be used for fiscal equalization. In the absence of such grants, fiscally stronger local governments can exploit their position to promote continued economic growth, some of which may come at the expense of poorer ones. Besides, the Centre has limited information and are under political constraints to not give generous grants in one jurisdiction over another.

Richard Musgrave: I disagree. I think local public sector should be financed by its own-source revenue like user charges and local taxes such as property tax. Similarly, consumption tax should be left to the States and income tax to the Centre.

Barry R. Weingast, Ronald McKinnon: But local governments should not rely excessively on debt financing because it can destabilize the economy as a whole. Local governments need hard budget constraints.

George Break: One second…and what if competition among local governments for economic development lower the outputs of public services by holding down tax rates?

Wallace Oates: Nah, local governments compete for mobile resources which not only generates income but also provide taxes for them. Therefore, local governments will try to pull these by adopting efficient levels of output.

Alice Rivlin: I think this competition can easily be tackled with some kind of a revenue sharing mechanism of national taxes which would free the states from worrying about losing business to other states with lower taxes.

After this stimulating discussion, do YOU think fiscal decentralisation is a way forward for better governance?

This view of fiscal federalism as stated above – also known as the First Generation of Fiscal Federalism or FGFF) assumes that public officials seek the common good without considering the behaviour of political agents which also seek to maximise their objectives in a political setting. Moreover, it was limited only to efficient allocative and distributive functions of the government and took for granted issues like asymmetrical availability of information and the existence of an effective political decision making process. Continued debate and exploration on the subject led to the Second Generation of Fiscal Federalism or SGFF which we will cover in our next blog.

** Viewpoints and text of the authors cited above have been edited for simplicity.

Footnotes

Conditional grants: These grants place various kinds of restrictions on their use by the recipient.
Matching grants: Grantor finances a specified share of the recipient’s expenditure.
Unconditional grants: These are lump-sum transfers to be used in any way the recipient wishes.

References

Arrow Kenneth (1970), “The organization of economic activity: Issues pertinent to the choice of market versus non-market allocation”, in Joint Economic Committee, The Analysis and Evaluation of Public Expenditures: The PPB System, Vol. I (Washington, D.C.:U.S.GPO)

Bird, Richard M. 1999. “Threading The Fiscal Labyrinth, Some Issues In Fiscal Decentralization”.

Brennan, Geoffrey, and James M. Buchanan (1980), “The Power to Tax: Analytical Foundations of a Fiscal Constitution” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)

Hansen, Alvin, and Harvey Perloff (1944), “State and Local Finance in the National Economy” (New York: Norton)

Inman, Robert P. and Daniel L. Rubinfield (1997), “Rethinking Federalism”, Journal of Economic Perspectives 11 (Fall), 43-64.

McKinnon, Ronald I. (1997), “Market preserving federalism in the American Monetary Union”, (London: Routledge), 73-93

Musgrave, Richard A. (1959), “The theory of Public Finance” (New York: McGraw-Hill).

Musgrave, Richard A. (1983), “Who should tax where and what?” in C. McLure, ED., Tax Assignment in Federal Countries (Canberra: Australian National University), 2-19.

Oates, Wallace E. 1999. “An Essay on Fiscal Federalism”. Journal of Economic Literature 37 (3): 1120-1149.

Oates, Wallace E. 2005. “Toward A Second-Generation Theory of Fiscal Federalism”. International Tax and Public Finance 12 (4): 349-373.

Olson, Jr., Mancur (1969), “The principle of Fiscal Equivalence: The Division of Responsibilities among different levels of government”, American Economic Review 59, 479-87.

Samuelson, Paul A. (1954), “The pure theory of Public expenditure”, Review of Economics and Statistics 36 (Nov.), 387-9.

Tiebout, Charles (1956), “A pure theory of local expenditures”, Journal of Political Economy 64 (Oct.), 416-24.

Weingast, Barry R. (1995), “The Economic Role of Political Institutions: Market-preserving federalism and Economic development”, Journal of Law and Economic Organization 11, 1-31.

Understanding Bureaucracy from the Bureaucrat’s Perspective

In the podcast below, Yamini Aiyar, Director of Accountability Initiative (AI), talks about understanding bureaucracy from the bureaucrats’ perspective drawing from AI’s research on frontline bureaucracy in the education sector.

Click here To listen to the full podcast

To learn more about understanding bureaucracy at the frontline, we present our key research papers.

The Post Office Paradox (2016)

Yamini Aiyar, Sharanya Bhattacharya

Elementary education administrators at the block level primarily perceive themselves, or report themselves to be, disempowered cogs in a hierarchical administrative culture that renders them powerless. Using the case of education delivery, this paper attempts to probe an administrator’s perspective in resolving the implementation problem at the last mile.

Click here

Education Reform and the Puzzles of Implementation (2015)

Yamini Aiyar, Ambrish Dongre, Vincy Davis

This paper unpacks the organisational culture and norms that make up the Indian state and how this impacts the crisis of implementation capability. Through detailed qualitative interviews of Bihar’s education administrators, this research analyses the Government of Bihar’s attempt to improve quality learning as part of a larger reform effort called the ‘Mission Gunvatta’.

Click here

Bringing the Education Administration Back Into the Classroom (2016)

Yamini Aiyar

In this blog, Yamini Aiyar, Director of Accountability Initiative, pulls from our earlier research to present key discussions on the need for education administrators to break away from the bureaucratic eco-system and focus on learning outcomes and quality service delivery.

Click here

Debating the Role of India’s Frontline Education Bureaucracy (2016)

Yamini Aiyar

Taking from the previous blog, this piece goes one step further to suggest practical and scalable suggestions to reform bureaucratic systems to directly impact learning outcomes and quality in education. These insights come partly from a discussion with key stakeholders (CBOs, education administrators) on the way forward for education bureaucrats.

Click here

Reforms in Education Bureaucracy (2016)

Vincy Davis

Vincy Davis talks us through the obstacles embedded in the bureaucratic environment of frontline education administrators that restrict the output of quality education. Her blog concludes with suggestion to adopt new approaches to circumvent these obstacles to ensure better learning in government schools.

Click here

To read about our work on Understanding Bureaucracy click here.

The Loneliness of the Ethical

I had ended my blog a fortnight back with a reflection on how difficult it is to maintain an ethical position, when the incentive structures within a society militate against ethical behaviour. The maintaining of an ethical position then means going against the grain and that can have adverse consequences on one’s career. This is what I left behind in my session on ethics in the Lal Bahadur Shastri Academy (LBSNAA). I asked questions of the young officer trainees as to how they would manage their ethical dilemmas, but stayed away from suggesting answers.

The LBSNAA has an excellent system of seeking feedback from the officer trainees on each lectures and I looked forward to receiving comments on my sessions. The feedback revealed that more than one officer trainee felt that I ought to have spoken more of real life situations, using case studies or even personal experiences from my career. Some felt that such an approach would have helped them better understand how to behave in tricky situations.

However, that was exactly what I did not want to do. Giving examples from one’s own life can soon deteriorate into long winded story-telling, when one often tends to sanitise one’s position and attempts to showcase success when there might not have been any. Besides, anecdotes do not tell the whole story of the agonising loneliness of those who take an ethical stand, in the face of large numbers of those who do not.

Even as I reflected on the feedback received from participants in my classroom sessions, I received a mail from a former colleague. This former colleague of mine was known for his integrity, but was generally known to also be a bit of an introvert. Over the years, as he became more senior, he began to militate against the increasingly corrupt system around him. He began to do so by first resisting attempts made to persuade him to do what he considered to be wrong things, and then, by writing petitions against officers he thought were doing so. He also began to seek information about officers he wrote against, through applications under the Right to Information Act. My personal opinion was that while there was some substance in his petitions, he also tended to write in broad based terms, accusing everybody of lack of integrity, including some officers who were known to be honest enough to serve with distinction and effectiveness within the government.

This riled the honest no end.

Therefore, when it came to the crunch, the former colleague of mine was pushed around. He did not make matters easy by often acting as if he were on strike when occupying various jobs; but he had plenty to complain against, as he was frequently transferred. Finally, matters reached such a stage that he was served with a compulsory retirement order, just four days before he was to retire in the normal course. I personally believed that whatever might have been the merits of the situation, such an action was unwarranted and reeked of vindictiveness.

Across India, if one looks at the civil services environment, one comes across several such instances of people who have been isolated, been transferred frequently, or even subjected to more stringent punishment, simply because they profess to occupy higher ethical standards than others and they say that out loudly. Sadly, vindictive action visits such people more frequently than on those who are popularly seen as being honest, but who might have bent a few rules and regulations to secure a few advantages.

While the case of my former colleague might be an extreme one, I relate it only to point out that the veneer of bonhomie that lies over internal relationships within the civil service, is often a barrier to the examination of integrity of individuals from a hard, dispassionate perspective. If we think that someone is a ‘nice guy’, we tend to be harsh on those who ask uncomfortable questions of them. The anger against those who question the ‘nice guy’ label, the hierarchical arrangement of the civil services and the drawing of several informal lines of behaviour traits that cannot be crossed, all together make it highly unlikely that a 360 degree appraisal system will actually work.

Today, a subordinate who gives an adverse report about an officer is likely to expose himself or herself to considerable risk. If such an adverse report is based upon a subjective position on what constitutes high integrity behaviour, then it becomes all the more difficult to sustain. The subordinate would tend to lose in the long run as he or she earns the reputation of being one who is difficult to work with. That, for an ambitious person, is disaster.

Since the risk inherent in a subordinate claiming that a senior officer lacks integrity, is dependent upon the very definition of integrity, another tricky question remains to be answered; how honest is Honest?

In my next blog, I will look at that question, within the context of the Civil Services.

A Digression into Ethical Dilemmas

Returning from an annual vacation, I was immediately informed that my blog had to resume forthwith. Apparently, the current blog series on confidential reports had generated much interest, and my adoring reading public was anxious for more. In order to exacerbate my guilt, I was told by the Grand Mufti of the Accountability Initiative website that continuity had been maintained in my absence, by recirculating earlier blogs of mine on leadership in the IAS. There is nothing more disturbing for a blogger to be told that his blogs are being recycled. It is an open threat to future relevance. It screams out, ‘we’ve got all your best lines already, so you could leave’.

Anyway, I had had plenty of time to think of what to write in my blogs during my month of absence. Holidays are good times to introspect, and I have never been a fan of the ‘get away from it all’ variety of breaks.

Just before I left, a former colleague, Nivedita Raju, pointed out that the system of confidential appraisal had undergone some major changes since I was in the government and that one of the changes introduced was that peers and subordinates would also have an opportunity to comment on the performance of the officer being appraised.

The more I thought about it, the less I thought it would work.

I also realised that that notion of mine is terribly unfair, because I would be pre-judging the change based on my preconceived notions of how hierarchies function in the government.

But let me state out my case.

Have you seen how government officers of a certain level in the government behave when they meet each other, particularly in case they do not have the faintest idea of who the other individual is? This happens quite frequently; government officers are not a close knit tribe where everybody knows everybody else. Particularly when officers come from different backgrounds and States, the chances are more likely than not, that they do not know each other well enough to begin to slap each other’s backs.

When two officers who know not each other, meet, a process is set in motion that would put the mating rituals of Sarus cranes to shame. Through a set of polite enquiries, often so subtle that they do not raise the suspicions of the one who introduces the two, a positioning game is played.

Let me describe how it works. Let us presume that IAS officer ‘A’ meets IAS officer ‘B’ at a wedding. They are introduced to each other by a busy host, with a quick opening statement that merely reveals to the other, that they both belong to the IAS. However, that is akin to a biologist describing an airborne creature as some kind of flying thingie; it does not enable the stickler for detail to conclude whether the said airborne object is a bird, a bat, Superman, or an UFO.

IAS officers are sticklers for detail. They need to find out quickly as to whether the individual opposite them are (a) Senior or (b) Junior to them and/or whether they are (c) Direct Recruits or (d) Promotees into the service. The nub of the matter is to find out the status and seniority of the other. However, a blunt approach is considered unsporting. It is distinctly rude to ask each other ‘what is your batch?’ – referring to the year of recruitment – thereby completing fifty percent of the positioning game in a flash.

No, the approach is far more subtle. A well worked gambit is for one person – usually the person who in appearance seems more decrepit than the other, and therefore, presumably the more senior of the two – to seek from the other the whereabouts of his batch-mates.

Thus for example, if I were to meet someone who is introduced to me as an IAS officer from another State, and who seems to be in a better state of physical preservation than I am, I would casually enquire from him how my batch-mates in his state were doing. That sets in motion a smooth and nearly instantaneous process of positioning. The moment I mention names, the opposite party discovers in an instant, my batch and thereafter, he can determine whether I am senior enough to him to be treated deferentially, or considered a peer, or that, in spite of my aged looks, that I am actually – a ghastly thought – junior to him.

When positioning is all important even in the most informal of contacts between officers, how can positions not interfere with objective, all-round appraisals?

There is one other reason why I think that a peer based appraisal system might be compromised – ambition. Everybody has it. And when the room at the top is restricted, it becomes the prime influencer of any behaviour; it does not recuse itself when 360 degree appraisals are undertaken.

More of how ambition, of both the person being appraised and of the appraiser, might distort reviews of performance by peers and sub-ordinates, in my next blog.

Human resources for health: “wicked” problems or misunderstood?

India, like many other countries, struggles with governance of its human resources for health. It is common knowledge that there are too few qualified health workers, that they are too unequally distributed to serve population health goals, and that the quality of services they provide is troublingly inconsistent. Inter-governmental bodies and national governments periodically rediscover these “wicked” problems and frequently advance previously attempted solutions – which often face failure, in repeating historical cycles of policy amnesia.

With examples from the speaker’s research and experience of policy reforms of 15 years, this talk will outline the inadequacies of prevailing, largely instrumental approaches to governance of human resources for health, such as retention, substitution and assimilation. The talk will illustrate how deeper socio-political phenomena such as professional dominance, pluralism, parallel systems and regulatory capture have shaped the character and dynamics of the health workforce, rendering it resistant to common policy solutions. The talk will conclude with instances of encouraging policy processes and political responses to health workforce problems, followed by a general discussion.

Kabir SheikhMBBS MPH PhD is the director of the Health Governance Hub at the Public Health Foundation of India, an Honorary Senior Lecturer at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Honorary Fellow at the University of Melbourne, and Visiting Professor at BRAC University Dhaka. He is a health systems researcher and policy analyst with broad interests in strengthening public sector and community institutions in low and middle-income countries. He is the founder and national scientific convenor of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare’s national knowledge platform (NKP) for health systems research, and in 2011 he co-authored the Government of India’s High Level Expert Group recommendations on universal health coverage. He is an editor of Health Policy and Planning (OUP), and in 2010 he edited the anthology Health Providers in India: On the Frontlines of Change (Routledge). He is the Vice Chair of Health Systems Global, the first international membership organization dedicated to promoting health systems research.

How Swachh is Bharat two years on?

The most visible programme remains invisible on the ground, Accountability Initiative finds

October 2 marked the second anniversary of the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM), the Government of India’s (GoI) flagship programme to achieve the goal of total sanitation by 2019. We bring to you findings from a recent study by Accountability Initiative (AI) at CPR, which analyses what has been achieved over the past two years. AI conducted a household survey of 7500 rural households in 10 districts spread across five states (Bihar, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Rajasthan) in December 2015. In the conversation below with Yamini Aiyar, Avani Kapur and Vikram Srinivas, we unpack the reality on the ground.

Where are we after two years of the Swachh Bharat Mission in rural India?

Yamini: Let me start by laying out what we have achieved. I think one of the most important things that we achieved on 2 October 2014 with the photo-ops of the Prime Minister and other senior government officials sweeping the streets of Delhi, and the announcement of making India open defecation free by 2019, is that for the first time the political establishment staked their political capital on achieving sanitation. For those of us who have been following sanitation policy for a while, this was a very significant change from the past when sanitation was largely ignored. This change is also very visible on the ground. In every single district that the AI team works in or has travelled to over the past two years, the entire administration is talking about the need to implement the Swachh Bharat Mission. The political pressure at the top has made sanitation a key implementation priority in the districts.

Another important change is a shift in rhetoric about the intended target and goal of the programme. One of the biggest limitations of sanitation policy, now widely acknowledged, is the belief that toilet construction alone will lead to achieving sanitation. Rather, sanitation is about behaviour change that can lead to creating an open defecation free environment.

Lastly, there is some movement towards measurement–the GoI’s Drinking Water and Sanitation Department has recently made public data from the NSSO (National Sample Survey Organisation) survey on sanitation, including an attempt to rank districts on the basis of open defecation free declarations. There are many flaws in these measurement efforts. However, the fact that an effort is being made to pursue third party measurement is an important first step.

Thanks for sharing the achievements. Given this shift in policy environment, do we actually see a change on the ground?

Yamini: To understand this, AI conducted a sample survey of 7500 households in 10 districts spread across five states to study the process of implementation of the SBM. The original idea of the survey was to draw on households that have reported to have constructed toilets as claimed in the data made available by the Swachh Bharat Mission Portal on its Management Information System (MIS). However, owing to a number of limitations in the current data base a full-fledged audit was not possible. Hence our survey studied the SBM in two ways. 1500 of our sample comprised households whose names featured in the MIS and the remaining were randomly selected.

So what are the data gaps?

Avani: As Yamini mentioned, we had hoped to track villages, households and habitations through the MIS data, but unfortunately, the quality of the data did not allow us to do so. For instance, census codes were not provided making it difficult for us to match village names, habitation names were often misclassified, and in many instances, we were unable to find households mentioned in the list. A closer look at the lists also pointed to a number of duplicate entries (of names and even Aadhaar numbers!).

So can you share findings were from the survey of households, which featured in the MIS lists?

Avani: To begin with we found that featuring in the governments’ MIS is no guarantee that the household actually has a toilet. We found about 29% of the households, which according to the MIS data had toilets, in fact did not have toilets. There were district variations. For instance, Nalanda and Udaipur had the largest gaps between the toilets reported and the actual presence of these as compared to other districts like Satara, where this was not the case.

Second, having a toilet does not mean that it is usable. We found that 36% of households themselves reported that the toilets in their homes were unusable (for reasons such as broken pits, unsanitary conditions etc.); of these, the usability numbers were also lowest in Udaipur and Nalanda.

Vikram: According to the SBM guidelines, every eligible household that constructs a toilet, and subsequently applies for an incentive grant is entitled to receive Rs. 12000 from the government. We found that even if a household featured on the MIS list, which means they ought to have received money from the government, as many as 40% households whose names featured in the MIS did not receive money from the government. There are district variations again. For instance, in Jhalawar 40% did not receive the money, while in Satara 90% did.

What about the rest of your sample? What can you say broadly about the implementation of SBM?

Yamini: In order for the government to achieve its goal of an open defecation free India by 2019, it set for itself a target of constructing 11 crore toilets. To achieve this, the government has to focus on two critical components: i) the first raising awareness and fostering behavior change; ii) facilitating/ supporting toilet construction. We assessed the implementation of the SBM from both these aspects.

Our most startling finding is that despite the policy rhetoric, the ceiling of expenditure on awareness raising had dropped from 15% under the previous Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan to 8% under Swachh Bharat Mission. A closer look at the expenditure data also showed that this money was largely unspent across most states. Expenditure on Information Education and Communication (IEC)–government parlance for awareness programs–decreased from 8% of total expenditure in 2013-14 to 1% in 2015-16.

This lack of focus on awareness raising is very visible on the ground. For instance: an important innovation introduced under the SBM was the creation of a cadre of volunteers known as Swachhta Doots responsible for spreading door to door awareness; yet only 6% of the households surveyed were aware of these Swachhta Doots. Further, only 10% reported having any knowledge of the Panchayat Swachhta Samiti–this being the case even though Panchayats have been conceptualised to play a crucial role in ensuring local buy-in. Similarly, only 10% reported that awareness programmes on sanitation were conducted in their villages, while a mere 3% of the households reported being visited by a government official to explain the benefits of the programme.

All of this may seem counter intuitive, as anyone who has travelled around India would have noticed that nearly every village wall has a painted symbol or slogan of the Swachh Bharat Mission, and there is a buzz amongst officials across all districts we visited. Yet are our survey shows, this buzz is still to translate into action on ground.

One important issue that we noticed during our field work is that districts are following standardised templates provided by the central government on how to build awareness. There is very little focus on building more local and direct engagement with the people involving actors like Swachhta Doots. It is equally important to create a concerted focus on the public health consequences of sanitation and hence the need for toilets. That is an important missing link–both administratively in terms of coordination between health and sanitation departments, as well as in terms of the messaging. The point needs to be driven home that the ultimate benefit of an open defecation free environment is ensuring quality public health outcomes.

Avani: The second critical component, as mentioned by Yamini, is the construction of toilets. Even today, two years into the programme, the lack of overall coverage of toilets and the continued presence of open defecation is a serious issue. Our survey found that only 37% of households had toilets in Jhalawar, 27% in Udaipur, and 58% in Jaipur in Rajasthan. Similarly, coverage was 23% and 33% in the districts of Nalanda and Purnia in Bihar respectively, and 40% in Sagar in Madhya Pradesh.

Yet, the picture is not all bleak. The pace of construction has undoubtedly accelerated in the last two years (since April 2014) with specific targeting of those districts, which had low toilet coverage according to Census 2011. For instance, in a district like Jhalawar, which only had 7% coverage in Census 2011, 81% of the toilets today have been built in the past two years.

However, there is an interesting observation here. Most people built toilets without government assistance: only one-fourth of the households that constructed toilets in the past two years received government grants. Further, the average cost of construction in most districts (except Sagar and Nalanda) was between Rs. 20,000–40,000, while the government grant is for only Rs. 12000.

Thanks for highlighting the issues with awareness raising and toilet coverage. But what about usage? This has often been mentioned as a critical lacuna in sanitation drives.

Vikram: It is encouraging to observe that with the exception of three of the districts we surveyed, most people who had toilets did use them. However, in the districts of Udaipur, Nalanda and Sagar, usage continues to be a problem despite the presence of toilets. For instance, 26% of households in Udaipur, 17% in Sagar, and 13% in Nalanda reported that at least one member of the household defecated in the open despite having a fully constructed toilet.

Yamini: An important thing that the usage data highlights is how difficult it is to actually track usage! We spoke to a number of sanitation experts before designing the usage question since the way you ask, how you ask, whom you ask, and how often you ask can all have consequences on the responses you may get. According to many experts, and even in our own experience, the best way to track and understand usage is through a deeper, qualitative case-study based approach. This may necessitate a different approach to monitoring. Usage may not be trackable through large scale surveys. Rather the government will need to build networks with anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists and others familiar with qualitative surveys to track usage effectively.

Based on your findings and understanding of the situation on the ground, what is the way forward to realise a Swachh Bharat?

Avani: Let us summarise what we recommend based on our survey findings:

Data quality: There need to be independent checks and verification of the MIS data. Audits both by government machinery as well as third party evaluations are key.
Awareness: it needs to be reiterated that it is important to establish the link between the need for an open defecation free environment and the resultant public health benefits at all levels, which is likely to generate greater uptake. The method employed needs to be direct, targeted, one-to-one communication, especially through generating local champions and building a movement. On the contrary, currently, one of the best practices put out by the government is the use of punitive measures, including vigilante groups and naming and shaming tactics, which is problematic.
Improved monitoring: For every single aspect of the programme, whether it is awareness raising or verification of toilet construction, the government is meant to and must monitor. However, we found that monitoring is very low at present, which also feeds into the poor quality of MIS data, making tracking progress difficult.

To read the Swachh Bharat Mission (Gramin) Budget Brief click here.

To access the data used for the study, click here.