Blog Archive - Page 74 of 130 - Accountability Initiative: Responsive Governance

UID and Service Delivery

Responding to a Parliamentary Question in December 2009, the Minister of State for Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution revealed a worrying truth -since 2006, 5,300,000 bogus ration cards had been identified in West Bengal. Andhra Pradesh wasn’t far behind at 1,046,000 and Orissa was amongst the lowest at 250,000! It’s not just ration cards. The Janani Suraksha Yojna (JSY), a program that entitles pregnant women with a cash transfer if they undergo an institutional delivery, is another example. According to the rules, the entitlement is to be given at the time of delivery. A recent study by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) found that a mere 8% of beneficiaries in Bihar received their money when discharged while Orissa topped the list at 20%. Given these inefficiencies, it’s no surprise that although social sector expenditures have increased by over 15 times in the last 15 years, India continues to perform poorly on every conceivable human development indicator.

An incentive structure that significantly compromises accountability to citizens lies at the heart of the problem, allowing inefficiency and corruption to proliferate. Take the instance of targeted subsidies. In 2009, the Government of India’s subsidy bill amounted to Rs. 1,11,000 crore. Yet, as the case of the bogus ration card shows, these subsidies rarely reach their target – India’s poorest. Inefficient targeting is, partly, a consequence of lack of transparency. Currently, there are no incentives to make information on beneficiaries public. This makes it impossible for citizens to cross-verify names and identify cases of duplicates and fraud, allowing corruption to foster. After all, in the absence of information, there are no questions. Where then are the incentives for government to be accountable?

Inefficient targeting is also a consequence of lack of voice. India’s poor have very few avenues to articulate their needs and hold the government to account. Moreover, when they face difficulties and harassment – be it submitting application forms or receiving payments on time – they have no means of redress. In such a scenario, the poor often find themselves excluded from systems and processes for accessing services.

Accountability requires that delivery processes are monitored to ensure that entitlements not just reach but reach on time. Currently, there are no incentives for monitoring processes and ensuring transparency in delivery. The government simply doesn’t have information on how money flows through the system, when and if it reaches the intended beneficiary. So, even if there are simple administrative bottlenecks that cause delays in processes, there simply is no way of identifying or fixing it. How then, can such a system be expected to deliver?

The Unique Identification Number (UID), by virtue of its ability to inject transparency in the system, has the potential to address some of these accountability failures. First, the fool-proof identification system can significantly reduce targeting inefficiencies. If the UID were to be linked with processes for distributing ration cards, for instance, it could weed out instances of fraud. More important, the UID has the potential to create a data platform which could link multiple data sets together making it feasible to cross-verify data and monitor progress. If the data set on ration cards, for instance, were linked to the data set of BPL beneficiaries, it would be feasible to cross-verify ration card applications and identify fake and duplicate names at the click of a button. This data, if placed in the public domain can significantly enhance transparency and empower citizens with a tool to hold government accountable.

But we must remember that the UID is merely an enabler. There are many things the UID can’t do. It can’t ensure that government departments work together to utilize the potential of a common data platform, it can’t ensure that departments monitor and track progress and can’t ensure that data is places in the public domain. Ultimately, effective service delivery requires effective implementers. And this means significantly altering the incentives they face so that implementers are accountable to citizens. It is only if administrative reforms go hand in hand with the UID, that there will be a chance that all the money spent in social sectors will result in improving India’s human development indicators.

Yamini Aiyar is the Director of the Accountability Initiative.

Accountability Initiative Summer Internships 2010

The Accountability Initiative, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi invites applications for a summer internship programme offering internship positions to interested MA and M.PHIL students. The internship programme affords an opportunity to students interested in undertaking policy research on the mechanisms of accountability in India’s governance institutions.

Case Studies on Accountability Internship: Recent years have seen significant changes in the design of social sector schemes and programmes. Flagship schemes such as the National Rural Health Mission, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme have inbuilt institutional mechanisms for accountability. But how are these mechanisms working on the ground? And are they effective? The Accountability Initiative wants to document the implementation of these new mechanisms through a series of case studies. Interns would be assigned a particular case study and required to undertake desk and field based research over a five to six week period.

Duration: The internship will be for five to six weeks from mid May – end June 2010.

Qualifications:

MA and M.PHIL students with a preference for those studying sociology, political science, history, economics, development studies, law and journalism;
Strong research and analytical skills;
Strong writing skills;
Interns must be willing to travel for up to two weeks of the internship;
Knowledge of vernacular languages (please specify in your application);

Compensation: Interns will be paid a stipend to cover their expenses.

Working at AI: The AI staff comprises a decided team of professionals with different areas of expertise including, economics, political science and development studies. The intern will be working out of the AI office. The case studies internship will provide interns with exposure to key issues in the debate on governance and accountability in India. The internship will also give interns the opportunity to develop their policy and field research skills.

Application Requirements: Please submit a resume and cover letter along with a writing sample and one reference to Mandakini Devasher at [email protected]. Please specify “Case Studies Internship” in the subject line of the email.

Applications Deadline: Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis. The last date for submitting applications is 1 April 2010. Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted. For more information on the Accountability Initiative log on to our website: www.accountabilityindia.org.

Employment Programmes By Any Other Name

Is it an employment program? Is it an anti-poverty program? Is it a safety net? Is it a disaster management program, is it…..? Actually, it’s all of these. Public works programs are both good development and good politics. India’s National Employment Guarantee Scheme (now called the Mahatma Gandhi EGS) , despite its implementation challenges, is fast becoming the stuff international lore is made of.

Demographers talk of the diffusion effects of ideas of low fertility and other behaviors. And while South Asian countries have a history of public works programs as safety nets – a history that actually goes back to the Maurya Empire in circa 3rd century BC – the diffusion effect of NREGS across South Asia is apparent. This is as much due to the urgent employment needs in all countries in the region, as due to the fact that the Congress victory in India was purported to have hinged significantly on NREGS.

Consider some South Asian countries. Nepal has several public works programs based on both cash and food. In the remote and intractable hill districts (known by the omnibus category of the “Karnali Zone”) the government implements a food for work program, for which the World Food Program delivers food. There are similar programs in southern Nepal. Last summer I was in Sunsari – the part of the Tarai that was ravaged by the Kosi floods – and it was quite clear that the demand of public works programs far outweighs the supply.

Bangladesh’s 100 Day Employment Program was evaluated independently by BRAC and the World Bank. The results have been very encouraging, showing reasonably good targeting of the poorest and efficient delivery of the program.

Bangladesh similarly has a long history of both food and cash based public works programs. Its success in dealing with the chronic floods and cyclones is well known, but lesser known is the fact that public works programs have come to the rescue of households who have been hit by these disasters. Sri Lanka is considering similar interventions for its internally displaced persons.

In response to the food and fuel crisis about eighteen or so months ago, both Nepal and Bangladesh stepped up their coverage of employment generation programs. Bangladesh’s 100 Day Employment Program was evaluated independently by BRAC and the World Bank. The results have been very encouraging, showing reasonably good targeting of the poorest and efficient delivery of the program. Building on the experience of the 100 Day Employment Generation Program the Government of Bangladesh is now implementing the Employment Generation Program for the Poorest (EGPP), a cash-based workfare program.

But Bangladesh’s EGPP is very different from India’s NREGS. While both are based on a long history of implementing public works, yet the India program has a guarantee that entitles individuals to receive compensation if the work they seek is not provided within a certain period. The state has accepted and in fact co-opted an “entitlement approach” that was initially pushed hard by a formidable civil society movement. Citizen monitoring is built into the NREGS design and social audits are mandated twice a year even implementation uneven across states.

Moreover, NREGS is linked to a larger grassroots movement that questions the manner in which in India’s growth has affected the poorest and the high levels of malnutrition that persist despite overall reduction of poverty. A movement that is aided by judicial activism, citizen vigilance and an activist intelligentsia. Bangladesh, despite its renowned NGO movement does not have similar movements that demand accountability from the state.

Why is this?

Maitreyi Bordia Das is Senior Social Protection Specialist in the South Asia Human Development Department at the World Bank in Washington DC. This piece was cross posted from Maitreyi’s Blog. Log on to read more of her blog posts.

SC Moves Appeal to Itself on RTI

In an unprecedented move the Supreme Court of India has moved an appeal before itself. The appeal has been filed against the landmark decision of the Delhi High Court in January which brought the office of the Chief Justice of India (CJI) under the purview of the Right to Information Act 2005. The appeal is set against the backdrop of debates within government about amending the Right to Information Act 2005 to exclude frivolous requests for information, discussions on policy matters and also the office of the Chief Justice.

ADB Report: Ensure Transparency and Enforce Accountability

“Implement priorities , monitor results, ensure transparency and enforce accountability” – that is the message of the Asia Development Bank’s 2009 report entitled “India 2039: An Affluent Society in One Generation”. The report talks about the need to rethink what the government does and how it does it. It specifically highlights seven facets of governance which are critical to the transformation of the Indian economy and society:

Create a smarter, more focused, agile and more credible government.
Retool the civil service to meet the needs of today and tommorrow.
Focus on the long term and open the public-private dialogue.
Support competitive markets and prevent capture of state organs.
Inculcate a code of self-discipline and ethical behaviour within the business community.
Implement priorities, monitor results, ensure transparency and enforce accountability.
Reverse the deterioration in political governance.

Assam to Guarantee Right to Health

Assam became the first state in the country to introduce a bill guaranteeing the right to health and well-being. The state government tabled the Assam Public Health Bill, 2010, in the assembly on March 12, 2010. The bill, will be put to vote on March 31.

The bill proposes to make it compulsory for both government and private hospitals to provide free healthcare services and maintain appropriate protocol of treatment for the first 24 hours to an emergency patient. Whether the state has the capacity to fulfil these promises may be debatable, it is certainly true that Assam has a long way in achieving this target.

We highlight the positional matrix of Assam related to health sector in the following graphs. (Figures are taken from the Lok Sabha website).

Sruti Bandyopadhyay is a Research Associate with Accountability Initiative

From the right to education to the right to food

From the right to education to the right to food, solving our development problems by clothing India’s citizens with new rights seems to be the flavor of our times. What should we make of this rise of rights? Skeptics have argued (and with some conviction) that this expansion of rights serves merely to raise expectations of delivery from a state that has proved conclusively that its greatest characteristic is its inefficiency. And so these new rights amount to nothing but political rhetoric. In a recent article on the subject the Economist suggests just this: ‘Perhaps its only indisputable achievement is political – as potential vote-winners, rights-based schemes are often attractive to politicians, no matter how effective they are’. And perhaps because of their political salience, another set of criticisms is that they serve as a diversion from the real challenge of creating an accountable and responsive state. While it could be argued that creating rights might in fact do just this, in reality – in a system where grievance redressal mechanisms are barely functional and the courts are no different to other arms of the Indian state (and should judges really be making decisions on areas where they have no competency?) – these new rights can never be made justiciable and thus have little credibility. See these two links on the subject:
http://in.news.yahoo.com/48/20100413/1241/top-i-know-my-rights.html
http://www.financialexpress.com/news/when-the-blueprint-isnt-sound/606392/

We need to think long and hard about creating effective grievance redressal; about undertaking much needed administrative reforms and at the very minimum about ensuring that people are made adequately aware of their rights and what this means for accessing services from the state.

So do we dismiss this expansion of rights as nothing but new labels on old bottles that will dilute their own credibility, as mere political rhetoric that will divert from the real challenge at hand? I think not. To understand the potential of these new rights, it is important to think of them in the context of the power dynamics that shape state-citizen relationships in India. It is now a commonplace observation that in much of India citizen- state relationships exist more in the realm of patronage – the paternalistic, mai-baap sarkar that distributes state largess – than in the realm of rights and responsibilities. In this sense Indian democracy has fallen short of its ideal –honoring the standing of citizens and free and equal persons. The invocation of the language of rights in citizen’s everyday dealings with the state offers the opportunity to re –frame modes of citizen engagement from that of being passive recipients to becoming active agents that ‘demand’ services as their right. And this is critical to accountability. In a panel discussion we organized a few months ago, Nikhil Dey made the interesting point that ‘accountability from, the citizen’s point of view, is inextricably tied to basic entitlements. Who can I hold accountable if I don’t have an entitlement?’

Consider the movement for the right to information – arguably the first (and perhaps most successful) effort in India to expand the notion of fundamental rights to the domain of social and economic rights. The movement pushed the frontiers of the notion of access to information to offer a radical interpretation of access to information as a ‘right’ that is fundamental to citizen’s right to participate in government and hold it accountable. This interpretation was premised on the notion that the provision of a ‘right’ fundamentally alters power asymmetries between citizens and the state by giving citizens an entitlement which they have a ‘right’ to demand. Two of Accountability Initiative’s researchers have recently completed a study of the effects of a citizen’s organization in Delhi – the Satark Nagrik Sangathan (SNS) – that has been working with slum dwellers (mostly women) to invoke the right to information as a means to access basic services – ration cards, widow’s pensions from the state. SNS has also been running information campaigns to build resident capacity to engage with the formal government system. A language of rights and entitlements is integral to SNS’s information campaigns. The study finds that making citizens aware of their rights and entitlements and pushing them to invoke these rights to access services has had an empowering influence on slum dwellers who are have increasingly more confidence in making demands directly to officials and politicians. In fact the study finds that awareness of rights and entitlements and the invocation of these rights in dealings with officials– particularly the right to information has had considerable success in enabling citizens to access basic services.

But in all of this one needs to acknowledge that the aspirations of rights approaches will only be met if one addresses the hard challenge of ensuring that entitlements are realized. We need to think long and hard about creating effective grievance redressal; about undertaking much needed administrative reforms and at the very minimum about ensuring that people are made adequately aware of their rights and what this means for accessing services from the state. The rhetoric of rights adopted by the current political dispensation offers an opportunity to do this. But this will require concerted civil society action. Can civil society rise to the challenge? And will civil society pressure be enough?

In sum, rights approaches could be the starting point of re-articulation of citizen state relationships – one that could fundamentally alter the nature of the Indian state. Or they could end up proving critics right and end up as yet another moment in Indian democracy that never took off.

Yamini Aiyar is the Director, Accountability Initiative.

Accountability News Update – 16 April 2010

A fortnightly round up of accountability news and views from around the world.

UK: Web-inventor calls for government data transparency
The inventor of the World Wide Web talks about the need for countries to open up and make public data accessible to all citizens.

Pakistan: Access to information now a fundamental right
The Right to Information is now a fundamental right in Pakistan following the insertion of Article 19A in the Constitution via the 18th Amendment Bill. Under article 19A, “Every citizen shall have the right to have access to information in all matters of public importance subject to regulation and reasonable restriction imposed by the law.”

US: Calls for ‘YouTube’ of Government data
US Technology Chief, Vivek Kundra has encouraged technology developers to create a ‘YouTube’ of government data in the US. The tool would enable people to “slice and dice” data to create mashups and web applications to reveal new patterns and carry out analysis.

UK: New Anti-bribery legislation comes into force
A new Bribery law in the UK heralds a clampdown on large UK businesses making payments to officials overseas to facilitate business, say experts. The new act has introduced an offence of corporate failure to prevent bribery. It is the first time such a law has existed in the UK. It also requires companies to have “adequate processes” in place to prevent such offences.

Canada: Delays leave access to information rights ‘totally obliterated’
A recent report on the performance of Canada’s Access to Information Act flags chronic delays as a serious impediment to citizens trying to access information. The report, entitled Out of Time, documents the extent of delays and identifies factors contributing to them, based on an assessment of how 24 federal institutions responded to access to information requests in 2008-2009. These institutions account for 88 percent of the requests Canadians submitted that year.

Brazil: Congress passes Right to Information Bill
The Lower House of the Brazilian Congress has approved a draft bill on the Right to Information. The RTI Bill now awaits approval by the Senate and if passed will give effect to the right to information enshrined in the Brazilian Constitution of 1988.

UPA First-Year Performance Review: Mixed Results, Promising Future?

As the UPA-II completes its first year, there have been a series of articles in the media assessing its performance on various fronts. Livemint has published a review of the UPA’s reform agena, Good Moves, Bad Press, and posted a podcast discussion with AI’s Yamini Aiyar on the UPA’s successes and failures. Click here to see a slideshow summarizing the major UPA policies. The economy appears to have rebounded well after the global financial meltdown, but according to Rajya Sabha member N.K. Singh, the government is stalling on the economic front and needs fresh initiatives and resolve. Listen to chief statistician of India Pronab Sen speak on the present state of the Indian economy under the UPA and what predictions can be drawn for the future, and view a graphic summary on the ups and downs of the economy over the year.

The UPA intended to focus on infrastructure development as a core interest over the past year, however its achievements on various infrastructure fronts have been mixed. Gokul Chaudhry, a partner at BMR advisors, provides perspective on the UPA’s challenges and successes in developing infrastructure in this audio discussion.

Finally, the Economic Times’ Debate Section includes a series on the UPA’s performance with perspectives from the CPI, the UPA, and the Opposition. Brinda Karat comments on how the diminished presence of the Left this year has led to a more opportunistic government, less focused on policies for the masses and more interested in its own agendas and the desires of powerful special interest groups. Salman Khurshid points toward the transformations in rural India, and the reforms made in education, law, and in areas concerning equality and minority empowerment as powerful indicators of the UPA’s success, and optimistically highlights the potential success of policies on the horizon. Arun Jaitley however, highlights the PM’s lack of control and what he views as a tendency of the government to favour the corrupt.