Blog Archive - Page 90 of 130 - Accountability Initiative: Responsive Governance

Thoughts on Types of Accountability

Nirvikar Singh

In the context of governance, accountability means that members and agents of government, i.e., politicians, employees and contractors are ultimately answerable to the citizens who provide the funds for their functioning, through taxes, fees and loans. Therefore, persistently poor public expenditure quality and inefficient delivery of public services, beyond what can be attributed to unavoidable constraints placed by financial and human resource limitations, must be traceable to weak accountability mechanisms operating for individuals (politicians and government employees) and for organizations (ministries and various public sector enterprises). Weak accountability also is central to the problem of corruption, which contributes to poor quality of public services.

Accountability is implemented through the provision of appropriate incentives for performance. For most of government, incentives and accountability are quite indirect, operating through organizational hierarchies. Only politicians are directly answerable to citizens through elections, and these are based on aggregate and incomplete assessments by citizens of politicians’ performance. Day-to-day accountability of politicians works through mechanisms such as the answerability of the executive to the legislature, the oversight of the judiciary, and general checks and balances within government. A federal structure adds the electoral dimension of accountability to subnational governments, but this can complicate the task of citizens in trying to assess performance.

To elucidate, one can categorize two fundamental types of accountability in governance: (1) that of elected officials to citizens and (2) that of other government employees to elected officials. The first can also be termed accountability through “voice”, political accountability or external accountability. Voice typically works through the electoral process, but one can also view direct appeals to the judiciary as a form of voice. In India, the broad use of public interest legislation can be seen as citizens’ using the judiciary to improve accountability of politicians, where electoral accountability is weak. An additional mechanism that provides external accountability is what Hirschman termed “exit.” Citizens may exit in two ways, either by shifting jurisdictions, or by going to the private sector for fulfilling wants that the government fails to provide adequately or effectively. In either case, the key enabler of exit is competition, between jurisdictions or between public and private provision.

The second type of accountability is more complex, since there can be vertical and horizontal chains of accountability within government as a whole, and within specific parts of government. Thus, this type of accountability includes “hierarchy” as a mechanism as well as checks and balances within government. One can also term this as “internal” accountability, broadening the standard usage of that term, which focuses on internal hierarchies, to include checks and balances.

Checks and balances are ignored in analysis that treats government as a dichotomous entity of elected and non-elected officials and neglects the broader dimensions of within-government accountability. For an example, consider the functioning of the Indian national parliament as an institution of accountability for the executive – its role in practice is weak, though it is supposed to have this function.

In considering forms of accountability, public interest legislation can also be interpreted as a hybrid of external (government-citizen) and internal accountability. One can possibly also distinguish “social” accountability, referring to the accountability of front-line service delivery units of government to clients. It seems that this is really a derivative of joint political and internal accountability. Yet another aspect of accountability is a division along quasi-functional lines: political, fiscal and administrative. Again, it seems that fiscal accountability, while very significant, is a joint product of political (external) and administrative (internal) accountability.

Nirvikar Singh is Professor of Economics at University of California, Santa Cruz.

On Data, and its Relationship with Accountability and Transparency

Notions of transparency and accountability have been evolving since late 1980s. It was advocated that people must be given information about budgets, especially details of heads where money was allocated and how it was spent. This would aid in enforcing transparency, accountability and participation. In the late 1990s, as cities developed, pressure on urban infrastructure increased and municipalities became unable to respond to people’s expectations owing to a variety of reasons. The prevalent view was that municipalities and local politicians are inefficient. Elected representatives were criticized for being corrupt and favouring their vote-banks by distributing city resources to them. It was also believed that use of discretionary powers perpetuates corruption. Contemporary accountability-transparency paradigm is aimed at making transparent to the public how and why discretion is exercised in different circumstances. This (presumably) will curb discretion as much as possible and tighten decision-making.

We need to understand who institutes infrastructure, how much, for whom and who benefits from what. But these issues cannot be raised in the absence of contexts to the data.

Publishing data in public domains as a way to enforce and enhance transparency and accountability has gained greater momentum in the current decade owing to the Right to Information (RTI) Act through which various kinds of information can be acquired. In this post, I am interested in exploring the concept of data to understand how accountability and transparency are reified by using data as a primary tool. With the help of examples, I will put forward the contention that what is presented as data is in fact produced through multiple histories and contexts. Organizing /interpreting data without an understanding of some of these histories can only enforce existing stereotypes and/or lead to oversight.

The Case of Discretionary Funds: In India, elected representatives are given discretionary funds annually. They can use this money, as per their discretion, to create infrastructure which will improve the condition of their constituencies. Information on how this money was spent has been gathered and made available in popular media. PRAJA Foundation has organized this information for Mumbai and has shown that most of the funds were spent on constructing community halls, anganwadis/crèches, toilets, roads and in the repairs of dilapidated buildings. It is evident that elected representatives have been spending part of the discretionary funds towards developing amenities for poorer populations in cities. This tends to get labeled as vote-bank politics. At the same time, this information is important for people residing in slums settlements so that they know of the claims they can make on their elected representatives.

Information of where and how discretionary funds were used cannot be interpreted holistically in the absence of geographical, historical, political, economic and social information about constituencies. Each area in the city has its own specificities. This implies that data have to be interpreted on the basis of local contexts. Moreover, administrative and institutional dynamics differ across the city. Further, some parts of the city are better endowed than others owing to age, location and patterns of urbanization. Here, we need to understand who institutes infrastructure, how much, for whom and who benefits from what. But these issues cannot be raised in the absence of contexts to the data. How then should data about the use of discretionary funds be presented? For now, it remains that discretion is exercised in particular social, economic and political contexts and therefore, presentation of latest data overlooks the historical, political and social context of constituencies in which various stakeholders and political actors are operating.

At any given point in time, those in positions of power and influence are able to exercise and fulfill their claims better than those who do not have the requisite political, social and economic capital.

Data about Land Records: A few months ago, I met SL. He was running a garage in South Bangalore but he did not own it. One day, the owners asked him to vacate the premises. He decided to find out why he was asked to leave. The owners had invited a builder redevelop the property. SL decided to wage a legal battle to assert his claims. But he lost the case because the owners bribed the lawyer representing him. Thereafter, SL decided to find out the history of the land ownership to challenge the current owners. He found that the land was formerly part of a village. Later, different individuals and groups had reclaimed parts of the land from the nearby lake. Some of the historical records showed that at one point in time, the land belonged to the municipality but currently, it was being owned by private owners. The records which SL managed to obtain, through various means including RTI and by befriending clerks and junior officers in different administrative and planning departments, showed that at each point in time, different groups had owned, rented and/or used the land. This meant that ownership of the land was neither singular nor straightforward and that there were multiple claims on that single piece of land. SL’s findings that at a certain moment in history, the municipality was suddenly declared owner of the land put into jeopardy the ownership claims of the current owners.

SL’s story provides an interesting nuance for analyzing land record databases. Peruvian economist Hernando De Soto promoted the idea of developing national databases that contain information about transactions around every piece of land in the country. This would help to enforce the individual’s property rights. Around 1980s, new laws and regulations were being developed in India regarding land ownership and rights which individuals have over their properties. In this period, the government of Karnataka introduced legislation for regulating tenures and ownership of agricultural lands in order to transform the regime that existed in the colonial period and bring it up to date with the present. In 1990s, land records in rural Karnataka were digitized and a system was devised whereby farmers could now approach government offices in the taluks to procure copies of their land records. This system was known as Bhoomi. It was introduced to curb the petty corruption which agents and village accountants indulge in when they issue land record certificates to farmers. The goal of Bhoomi was to make the system of issuing land record certificates more efficient, transparent and accountable. However, such transparency led to drastic consequences for tenant farmers and small and marginal tillers and sharecroppers because their tenures and usufruct claims were not recognized under the new state legislation.

Information regarding ownership of land is rather sensitive because of the tremendous value associated with land and also because land in India is possessed and used under various arrangements known as tenure. Some tenure systems are recognized by government bodies but many others are not. This produces a condition of “illegality”. Further, ownership of land, as we have seen in SL’s case, is not only complicated but is also contested. This means that at any given point in time, those in positions of power and influence are able to exercise and fulfill their claims better than those who do not have the requisite political, social and economic capital. Besides this, there is never single and absolute ownership of land perpetually; possession and use of land changes hands of individuals, groups and political institutions from time to time. Databases and information repositories of land records and property transactions are situated in this highly fraught and political context. Moreover, as is evident from SL’s case, current land ownership data overlooks the multiple trajectories through which the present has been produced, i.e. there is no information about previous ownership and usufruct claims and about how the present has come to be the way it is today. But it is also rather difficult to obtain a thorough and exact account of such trajectories because official records can be fudged/appropriated/reproduced not only by the claimants but also by government officials. This is dependent on who is making what claims and which institution and/or group is more powerful in the conflict. Therefore attempts to make land transactions transparent by organizing information of past exchanges into databases can have negative consequences for those groups who do not have the resources and influence to defend their claims in the present.

Data about the nature of complaints made in every part of the city and the performance of each of the wards over the four-year period demonstrated that in some cases, some wards had actually managed to resolve certain complaint areas which had become chronic.

My goal in citing this example is to show that data are located in temporal contexts i.e., data are produced and reproduced from time to time, by different groups and institutions, and that what is recorded as current data has several histories behind it which cannot be deciphered through streamlined databases. Data are also located in a political context – who produces what data, what is propagated as ‘information’ and who benefits/loses from the availability/publication of particular data are important questions for the accountability-transparency paradigm.

End Notes: I realize that this post is getting too long and that the discussion can be continued in further posts. However, before I conclude, it will be instructive to look into cases where data can have positive consequences for performance and accountability. In some cases, this impact may be known only in retrospect but it is useful to understand the process and to bear in the mind that sometimes, data presents a holistic picture only when reviewed over longer periods of time. In Mumbai, in 2003, a complaint management system was launched as a joint initiative of PRAJA Foundation and the municipality. The purpose of this system was to organize complaints (about civic issues) received through letters, telephone, fax, email and personal visits into one comprehensive system. This was known as the Online Complaint Management System (OCMS). Complaints were fed into this computerized system. Data regarding the resolution /non-resolution of complaints and pendency was also inputted into the system. OCMS also generated data about complaints made by citizens, top five complaints received in each month in every ward and performance of the wards in resolving complaints. OCMS thus enabled citizens and NGOs to monitor the working of the municipality and the ward offices.

In civic activism, negative perceptions of administration and government and long-held stereotypes influence the manner in which data is interpreted. The monthly complaints data was often used to shame the administration for non-performance and inefficiency. I will get into the details of the OCMS here. But it is interesting to note is that the complaints data in fact worked as a form of feedback for the administration. Four years after it had been implemented, the administration decided to take over the OCMS and to operate it unilaterally. The complaints data generated between 2003 and 2007 was collected and analyzed in PRAJA. The data about the nature of complaints made in every part of the city and the performance of each of the wards over the four-year period demonstrated that in some cases, some wards had actually managed to resolve certain complaint areas which had become chronic. At some points in time, repeated complaints about one or two issues had even alerted the administrative machinery which had managed to curb the issues in time before they could become chronic. Thus, the complaints data actually served as a form of feedback for the municipality.

To conclude then, data are situated within contexts. These contexts have been produced over time i.e., the present has come to be what it is today owing to many trajectories of the past. Therefore, data also needs to be organized and interpreted within the past and the present. Providing today’s data, whether it is weekly, monthly or annual, is only a partial account. Overlooking the histories which produced this present data can lead to short-sighted reading and action.

Zainab Bawa is a PhD student at Centre for the Study of Culture and Society in Bangalore, and Research Fellow at Centre for Internet and Society.

Teachers: Overpaid or Overburdened?

I recently had the opportunity to interview 16 teachers from 7 schools across 2 districts in Uttarakhand as part of a study being conducted by J-PAL, MIT aimed at understanding the institutional dynamics of the Read India programme – an accelerated learning programme launched by the NGO Pratham. We wanted to know what teachers thought of Pratham’s training, materials and monitoring, the difficulties they faced as well as the changes (positive and negative) brought about within the classroom dynamics by using this new teaching method.

While the report itself is still in its draft stages, there were a few points that came out of the teacher interviews, which raise some questions regarding the current system of education and teacher accountability – which is what the blog post is about.

Teachers felt that the training they received were disconnected from many of the real problems afflicting the school– i.e., lack of teachers, disinterested parents, lack of discipline amongst students, and a general disinterest in education.

Broadly, there were four things that came up consistently in the teacher interviews. First was the lack of teachers and high pupil-teacher ratios, which according to the teachers, caused difficulties in implementing programmes including Read India. Teachers testified to feeling over-burdened with administrative and other duties such as supervision of the Mid-Day Meal and were thus unable to devote time to new teaching methods like using the Pratham materials. As a teacher said, “In a school that has over 150 students and only 2 teachers, if we were to divide the students up and pay individual attention to the weak students , what would the other students do?”.

This shortage of teachers was reaffirmed by the government block and district officials. In Haridwar for instance, they revealed that of the 117 schools, 42 schools had only one teacher, and 3 schools had no teachers at all!

Second was the constant pressure to finish coursework and curriculum. Pratham spends a lot of time and effort designing materials that will be relevant to the students. Even the teachers testified that the innovativeness of the material increased student enthusiasm, and was a useful learning tool as compared to the rote-learning often used in finishing the curriculum. There did however appear to be a disconnect between the Pratham goals of improving basic learning levels and the government’s emphasis on finishing the school curriculum. The teachers appeared stuck in the middle between these two divergent demands.

Moreover, teachers felt that the training they received were disconnected from many of the real problems afflicting the school– i.e., lack of teachers, disinterested parents, lack of discipline amongst students, and a general disinterest in education.

And finally, all teachers indicated that monitoring was weak and said increased monitoring would be encouraging, when it was of the supportive kind, assisting them in learning new techniques and helping them in their teaching process rather than just requiring them to fill government forms.

While these testimonies from the teachers are by no means unique observations, they do raise some hard questions on our current educational system. Teacher salaries in 2007-08 according to DISE corresponded to 31.48% of the total expenditure done by the SSA. These teachers are costly and we are all contributing to it through the education cess. Estimates indicate that private school teachers earn close to 40% of their government colleagues’ income. Yet, the fact remains that the quality of education remains abysmally low for a vast majority of Indian children, and not much effort is being made to find out the causes.

The current Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Bill is a great first step, a closer look at the Bill indicates that many of these endemic problems have still not been addressed.

Through the 1980s and the 1990s, the government focussed all its energies on getting children into schools, and enrolment data became the principle tool for monitoring progress, including of teacher performance. It’s only in the last three to four years that government officials have begun to openly admit that motivation and accountability among teachers is also a big problem. Yet, the tendency has been to regard the lack of learning as being solely due to lack of teacher motivation, and place blame squarely on the teachers, without looking at underlying structure of the educational system which might also be contributing to the problem.

As early as 1999, the PROBE Report (Public Report on Basic Education in India) had found that despite a major increase in the number of teachers appointed, the pupil-teacher ratio in the survey areas has shown little improvement over the years. Today too, according to ASER, 2007 the median pupil-teacher ratios in primary schools remain as high as 39.

Further, in the current structure, monitoring is weak and teacher incentives are skewed. Salaries are not performance-based and there is a constant pressure to finish the curriculum rather than concentrate on helping children to actually learn.

While the current Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Bill is a great first step, a closer look at the Bill indicates that many of these endemic problems have still not been addressed. According to the Bill, Government schools do not need to meet any norms except the pupil-teacher ratio, and unlike in private schools, there are no consequences for failing to meet this basic norm. Moreover, the Bill legitimises the practice of multi-grade teaching, where more than one grade is being handled by the same teacher, simultaneously. The number of teachers is based on the number of students rather than on grade. So, for instance, a primary school having less than 60 students gets only 2 teachers, regardless of the number of grades in the school.

This commentary is by no means meant to absolve teachers of their shortcomings. Teacher absenteeism is indeed very high in rural areas. The PROBE Report, 1999, showed how 1/3rd of Head Teachers were absent during the study, and even of those present, teachers hardly taught. In another study conducted in 3 states, classroom observations showed, shockingly, that each group of children was taught for only around 25 minutes in a day (Ramchandran et al, 2004)! Teacher ability is also another big problem. A forthcoming study in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar reports that teachers lack even the most basic skills – less than 50% could summarize a class 5 text.

However, as I pointed out above, the problems faced by teachers are also real, and do need to be dealt with. Instead of always thinking about teachers as being overpaid and underperforming workers, maybe it is time for us to start looking into the underlying reasons for their lack of motivation, and think about increasing relevant training and support, and improve their incentives to perform through a more rational accountability structure. Our current educational structure needs a serious revisiting.

Avani Kapur is Researcher and Coordinator of PAISA project at Accountability Initiative.

Responsive governments need responsible citizens: Bringing citizen accountability into the debate

The Mid-Day Meal (MDM) scheme aims to deliver daily cooked meals to every child in every Indian government primary school, and is currently the largest school-feeding programme in the world, covering 120 million children in government and government-assisted schools. However, although the MDM’s overall effects are positive, implementation remains varied. For example, within Delhi, children in some schools receive regular meals of a good quality, while others receive meals irregularly, if at all, and quality varies widely.

In Delhi, as elsewhere, there are problems in both delivery and distribution, which may or may not be alleviated by increasing the MDM scheme’s budget. Why do these problems exist? Caterers, unsurprisingly, often argue that the government is not paying them enough. The suggestion is that if the government increased spending and provided adequate funds for better kitchens, extra ingredients, transport facilities, and staff, delivery problems could be eliminated. Doubtless, more resources for caterers would improve meal delivery. However, this alone will not ensure perfect implementation everywhere. First, deliveries may still be late, inadequate, poor quality, or absent, as at present. Second, once food has been delivered to schools, not all the food is always distributed to children.

The Right to Food Campaign (RTFC) seeks to improve MDM implementation primarily by holding the government accountable for the scheme and by pressurising the government to further improve MDM delivery.

Accountability in the MDM scheme can be considered at two levels. At the first level, caterers need to be accountable to the government for delivering meals, and the government needs to be accountable to citizens for managing the caterers. ‘Accountable’ in the MDM scheme means that if caterers do not deliver adequate quantities and qualities of food on time, the government and the people will be aware of this and can punish the caterers in some way, or seek compensation. As client, the government should impose sanctions on caterers. But as the government is ultimately responsible to its citizens for the scheme, the government is accountable to citizens for imposing sanctions and managing the caterers. Most approaches to accountability have focused on this three-way relationship. No exception, the Right to Food Campaign (RTFC) seeks to improve MDM implementation primarily by holding the government accountable for the scheme and by pressurising the government to further improve MDM delivery.

My field research indicates, however, that focusing on these ‘macro-level’ accountability relationships is necessary but not sufficient to ensure that each child receives his/her entitlement. Accountability at the macro-level needs to be reinforced by accountability at the local, or ‘micro-level’, where providers are held accountable by individual citizens/recipients and where citizens (school parents) engage positively with the scheme. Parents must participate actively in the monitoring committees, composed of teachers, parents, community members and a local government official, that were set up by a 2006 Government Order to monitor the delivery and distribution of the food, and register complaints to the government and caterers when food is below standard.

Based on fieldwork in two schools in Delhi, my research shows that the parent participation necessary to generate ‘micro-level’ accountability does not occur everywhere. Where such parent participation occurs, the MDM scheme functions well, and where it does not, the scheme delivers poorer results. The paper therefore argues that scholars and practitioners should pay more attention to these micro-level actions, and seek to explain why parents engage actively in holding caterers accountable only in some schools. My research indicates that the level of accountability among citizens determines the extent of their participation and, to a large degree, the success of the scheme. A notion of ‘citizen-citizen accountability’ could therefore usefully be incorporated into current approaches to state-and-provider accountability. Building on the idea of social cohesion (referring to reciprocity, trusteeship, obligation, solidarity and inter-dependence), citizen-citizen accountability implies parents’ mutual answerability in fulfilling obligations, and the imposition of (informal) sanctions in case of non-participation or participation for private gain.

The RTFC has drawn significant attention to short-comings in government efforts to implement the MDM scheme effectively, little attention has been paid to the importance of local level accountability relationships in ensuring the success of the scheme.

In one of the two schools studied, the MDM scheme worked well (i.e. children typically received food on a daily basis, either directly from the MDM scheme or from replacement sources organised by parents and teachers). In the other, the MDM scheme worked very poorly (i.e. delivery was erratic and there were no replacement sources). Based on focus group discussions and interviews with teachers, students and parents, the effectiveness of the MDM scheme seems not to depend solely on the accountability relationships between the government and citizens. Rather, good implementation depends very significantly on the level of (historically generated) social cohesion (such as notions of trust and reciprocity) between parents, and between parents and teachers. Just as citizens can be considered to have an obligation (in law and morality) not to destroy public property, they can be considered to have an obligation to engage positively with the MDM scheme. The implication of this analysis is that increasing MDM scheme funds and focusing solely on government accountability will not fully eliminate implementation problems. Activists (including the RTFC) and scholars should also focus on citizens’ accountability to each other, and to the government.

Assessments of the MDM scheme have consistently focused on the lack of government accountability, and by extension wholly ignored the critical role of citizen accountability in the success of such schemes. While the RTFC has drawn significant attention to short-comings in government efforts to implement the MDM scheme effectively, little attention has been paid to the importance of local level accountability relationships in ensuring the success of the scheme. These local level relationships, which constitute parent-monitoring committees responsible for oversight of the delivery of the MDM, are an essential factor in determining whether the scheme is successful on a school-to-school basis.

Araddhya Mehtta is a Consultant with the Accountability Initiative. Her research has been published as part of our Engaging Accountability: Working Paper Series and can be downloaded here.

Dissent Economics: Thoughts on an inclusive future

Accept it. Deep down, perhaps even precariously near the surface, in your heart you love the fact that being well-off is slowly returning to vogue. You heap scorn at the fashion weeks (no, you couldn’t have missed them because India had four, or maybe five this year) but you are enormously glad that someone, somewhere had enough money in India to celebrate leggy models and largely unwearable clothes so many times.

Chances are you love the fact that the downturn is coming to an end – unless you belong to India’s Communist parties and were trashed in the polls – and are delighted to know that you will not lose your job after all.

But, as Jeffery Sachs says, most likely the lessons of the downturn are fast being forgotten and no matter which way you read the alphabet soup of recovery (‘L’, maybe ‘V’, why not ‘W’?), there is little doubt that bubbles are forming once again even as the first champagne bottles, in a year and a half in some cases, are being uncorked.

So what lessons are being forgotten post the downturn?

In July, in a special issue, The Economist pointed out that how the bubble burst is fundamentally altering economic theory, arguing that macroeconomists, especially central bankers, “were too fixated on taming inflation and too cavalier about asset bubbles”.

Is capitalism now on an irretrievable collision course with the greater common good and has it now been irretrievably proved that left to itself, un-shepherded capitalism is apocalyptic?

Now, as the US economy reports growth for the first time in about a year, officially, as some newspapers have reported, ending the “longest since World War II” recession, the question to ask is what forms asset bubbles, why are they ignored and is it possible, somewhere, even at this moment, more asset bubbles are forming but there is little chance that we will know what they are until they burst spectacularly?

The downturn has brought several theories of melting pedestals of finance and macroeconomics and rethinking, more dramatically, the basis of neo-liberal capitalism. The question – many have asked – is, is capitalism now on an irretrievable collision course with the greater common good and has it now been irretrievably proved that left to itself, un-shepherded capitalism is apocalyptic?

The answer of course is yes, and yes.

In our terror-ridden world, economic and political apocalypse is, assuredly, intertwined.

If you peer closely at the debate that surrounds analysis of Wall Street greed to Maoist violence in India’s infamous Red Corridor, from terror recruits in dysfunctional, and one is being kind here, North Africa, to the new great game for oil, friction and finance are constant bedfellows.

Look closely at what India’s considers the biggest threat to the nation state these days – Maoist violence. With an estimated one-third of the country controlled continuously or intermittently by Maoists and ever increasing instances of violence, including the heavily politicised train-jacking, there is reason for real concern.

But at the heart of the battle is a deep service delivery failure. Decades of poor delivery of resources and opportunities in India’s large tribal swathes have turned them into a battlefield where argument for a different, inclusive model of development have reached bullet-point.

For evidence, listen to the latest statements of Kishenji, the ever-elusive but omnipresent Maoist chief, always shot with his back to the camera and a gun strategically slung on the shoulders (so that the gun faces the camera even if he does not) who has challenged the West Bengal government to finish development faster than the Maoists.

Among the Maoist brag: they would sink 100 tube-wells in the next month and also set up 15 temporary hospitals. All this barely 200 kilometers from Calcutta.

Rebels are doing what the government has not in 60 years.

In Peshawar, widely known as Pakistan’s (Asia’s?) Wild West, Pakistani diplomats have often told me why there is so much support for the Taliban. They bring security and a sense of the fair rule of law which the corrupt administration has always failed to deliver.

So while asset bubbles are created in one part of the world, another breeds violence devoid of basic guarantees of the nation state and the two are in constant path of collision.

There is a big common ground between conservative politics and neo-liberal economics – an almost fascist disdain for dissenting views. In India, this has meant that as the country squeezes 20 years of Western growth in two or three years, there is little space of questioning this development model.

In this arrogance of development, dissent is not merely derided, it is treachery.

The big lesson of the post-downturn debate is whether in the world of Maoist violence and terror attacks, in a world of the debris of once-great banks, can there be space for Dissent Economics?

Dissent Economics, formalised as part of mainstream debate, will ease radical pressures on the system and would aid cooperative negotiation that are more effective in bringing change.

In his prophetic essay ‘The Future of Dissent’ on the ‘Futures’ edition of India’s leading thought journal Seminar in December 1997, historian Ashis Nandy wrote:

“It is the responsibility of the citizen-futurist… to defy and subvert the ‘inevitable’ in the future, only another name for a tomorrow which dare not be anything other than a linear projection of yesterday. Students of the future owe it to themselves to create a gap between those whose idea of the future is modelled on the Wall Street share market or on nineteenth century Europe and those ideas of the future that could be called contemporary versions or reincarnations of the prophetic.”

As Wall Street alchemists now know, the future might often not be the linear projection of the histories of the past.

Through the idea of Dissent Economics, I want to argue that our collective future can be far better prophesied if space is made for dissent. Dissent Economics, formalised as part of mainstream debate, will ease radical pressures on the system and would aid cooperative negotiation that are more effective in bringing change.

How can Dissent Economic Theory be statistically integrated to mainstream analysis?

The beginning must be far away from the data charts, on the field, by allowing and indeed enabling processes bring together dissenting viewpoints into mainstream debate. Provisions such as these already exist in government programs in education, health, employment guarantee schemes etc, but need to be implemented better.

Dissent Economics seeks to understand and extract from what initially might seem to be fringe criticism of popular notions but through micro-analysis is able to extract clues and forecast scenarios that takes a more holistic picture of the future, not so much as a linear projection of the past, but the sum of total of collective experience and opinions where even a breakaway radical critique centre might be explosive enough to derail the ‘inevitable’.

Dissent Economics at its core of course is about democracy.

Hindol Sengupta is Associate Editor, Bloomberg UTV.

Making the RTI Work: A public hearing on the effectiveness of the Rajasthan State Information Commission

Recently, Jaipur’s Rajasthan University played host to the first ever Jan Manch or public hearing to evaluate the operations of the state’s Information commission (SIC). Organized by a network of Rajasthan based civil society organizations including the Rozgar Evum Soochna Adhikaar Abhiyaan, the Jan Manch brought together a motley crew of appellants, activists, and journalists on a common platform to share their experiences in dealing with the commission and debate its effectiveness in safeguarding the provisions of the Right to Information Act (RTI) in the state. What made the Manch unique was the constant stream of senior government officials, including the State Information Commissioner, through the day who sat through parts of the hearing and participated in the deliberations that followed.

As an observer to the day’s proceedings, I was struck by the importance of the event first, because it struck at the heart of the RTI – as the arbitrator of decisions on the nature of information that falls within the purview of the law the information commissions are the last word on the RTI. They thus set the benchmark against which the effectiveness of the implementation of RTI can be judged. Second, by bringing citizens together to share their experiences and debate the effectiveness of the commission in the presence of the commissioner and other officials, the event is a watershed in the nature of citizen-state engagement and the tools and spaces available for citizens to monitor government performance and demand accountability.

By bringing citizens together to share their experiences and debate the effectiveness of the commission in the presence of the commissioner and other officials, the event is a watershed in the nature of citizen-state engagement and the tools and spaces available for citizens to monitor government performance and demand accountability.

In the days preceding the Manch, meticulous research was undertaken to procure data from a wide sample of second appellants, analyze and document their experiences. 700 questionnaires were circulated to appellants across the state soliciting information on their experiences. Over 200 appellants responded. Efforts were also made to directly contact appellants and invite them to share their experiences at the Manch. The research culminated in the preparation of a comprehensive report of the operations of the Information Commission that was shared with participants at the Jan Manch. These findings ensured that the day’s discussions were rooted in objective evidence and real experience.

The survey revealed important facts about the effectiveness of the commission. First and perhaps most worrying, the appeal process rarely results in citizens accessing the information requested. As many as 68% of the respondents said that the commission upheld the decisions made by the Public Information Officers (PIOs) and rejected the appeals. The respondents also said that this reflected a bias in favour of the PIOs. The import of these rejections needs to be understood in the context of the nature or basis on which these decisions are made. A recent nationwide assessment of the RTI conducted by RAAG found as many as 58% of the rejections upheld by the Rajasthan SIC were unjustified and did not comply with the provisions of the Act. In this scenario, the high number of rejections by the commission is worrying. To evaluate the extent to which the appeal process assists citizens in accessing information, respondents were asked whether they received information post the appeal process. 50% respondents said that the appeal process did not result in their receiving information rejected while 30% said that they received parts of the information they wanted.

Another problem the survey highlighted was that of compliance with the commission’s orders. 83% respondents whose appeals were accepted by the commission said that they are yet to receive information from the PIO indicating that PIOs rarely comply with SIC orders. Many activists argue that the reason for this is the failure of the SIC to impose penalties on errant PIOs and award compensation to harassed citizens. According to data collected by RAAG the Rajasthan SIC has imposed 25 penalties since its inception. The survey undertaken by the Jan Manch also highlighted this problem. Respondents were asked if they felt the PIO ought to have been penalized in their respective cases. As many as 90% respondents felt their case merited the imposition of a penalty but a mere 8% said that penalties were actually imposed. Other problems highlighted by the survey included long delays in the SICs and constant postponement of hearings. This is not specific to Rajasthan. The RAAG study found that disposal rates are extremely poor across the country and waiting time for a case to be heard can vary between 2-20 months!

Bringing together citizens and government officials on a common platform to scrutinize the implementation of the RTI and offer suggestions, the Jan Manch demonstrated the potential of platforms such as this to strengthen the implementation of the RTI

The Jan Manch provided an opportunity for citizens to share their travails with the SIC and the government. About 100 second appellants participated in the Manch. There was Raman Kumar who has been trying to access documents pertaining to his pension from the education department since 2007. He has made over 10 visits to the IC and is yet to get his information. There was Ram Kumar Gagani from Chittorgarh whose story reflected the arbitrariness of appeal decisions. His appeal was initially accepted by the IC but the PIO refused to comply. Following this, he filed another appeal to the commission, but this time the commission turned its previous decision on its head and rejected Mr. Gagani’s appeal!

Through data and real life experiences, the Manch unraveled the many challenges to the effective implementation of the RTI. More crucially, the process created the opportunity for citizens and government to debate solutions. The organizers of the event put together a list of demands that they put forward to the SIC. Stricter compliance with section four disclosure norms; the creation of a single window system for submitting RTI applications; spreading awareness about the RTI; speedy disposal of IC cases and stricter imposition of penalties and the inclusion of penalties as an indicator for PIO performance evaluations and finally the tabling of SIC annual reports in the state legislatures were some of the key demands and suggestions made. Panelists and participants also made suggestions towards addressing some of the weakness within the IC. Important amongst these was the suggestion that the IC could publically report on the compliance to its orders by government departments and PIOs. This could go a long way in creating pressure necessary for PIOs to respond to IC orders. The need for better training, budgets and staffing norms were also discussed.

By meticulously analyzing the everyday operations of the commission and bringing together citizens and government officials on a common platform to scrutinize the implementation of the RTI and offer suggestions, the Jan Manch demonstrated the potential of platforms such as this to strengthen the implementation of the RTI. To me, the most revolutionary aspect of the day’s proceedings was not so much the complaints citizens made but rather the fact that much of the day was spent discussing concrete suggestions for improving performance. Making complaints is easy but offering constructive suggestions for improvements is much harder. The importance of these suggestions is that many came directly from citizens who have invoked provisions of that Act and are thus well versed with its strengths and weaknesses. Second, the Jan Manch marks the first time that citizens voluntarily came forward to scrutinize government functioning and engage in a constructive dialogue with officials. The presence of officials through the day suggests the beginnings of a significant mind-set change within the government where officials have at least recognized the value of direct citizen engagement. All participating officials spoke of their desire to receive constructive suggestions and feedback through this Manch.

Most important, the Manch is a testimony to the tranformatory potential and power of the RTI. The very fact that hundreds of citizens responded to survey questions and many of them willingly made their way to Jaipur to share their experiences is evidence enough of the power of the RTI. What we need are many more Jan Manches.

Yamini Aiyar is the Director of Accountability Initiative, and Senior Research Fellow at Centre for Policy Research

Gram Nyayalayas: a cause for optimism?

Union Law Minister M V Moily recently announced that 200 gram nyayalayas will be operational by October 2nd 2009. This initiative is taken under the 2008 Gram Nyayalayas Act. The Law Ministry envisions setting up some 5,000 gram nyayalayas across India over the next three years, with the hope to fundamentally reshape the lower judiciary in India. The 2008 bill states that eventually every intermediate (i.e. block) panchayat will have a gram nyayalaya. The gram nyayalayas will then form the new lowest layer to the Indian judicial system and the first point of contact for many, if not most Indians. If fully implemented, it is here that the majority of legal disputes in India will be resolved. Who will be these Nyayadhikaris, will there be enough of them to significantly bring down the estimated 30,000,000 cases currently pending in the judicial system, and will they be accountable?

The District Court judge is given the responsibility to appoint a judicial officer to inspect Gram Nyayalayas in their district at least every six months.

In the 2008 bill it states that these Nyayadhikaris’ qualifications are that of a first class judicial officer, or essentially just a lawyer. He or she will be appointed by the state government in consultation with the High Court in the state. In essence, the imagined recruitment pool is young lawyers, not particularly well trained, aspiring to be magistrates and then later district court judges. Although they may not be seasoned lawyers when they start, many of the problems they encounter won’t be that complicated and if paid well enough the job could start attracting some talented young lawyers. It will be critical to watch over the coming months and years the quality of lawyers being appointed and what sort of prestige the position gains, which will influence the ability to attract future talent. However, given the low quality level of some (but certainly not all) judicial magistrates, session court judges, etc. there is definitely reason to worry that these appointees may not have the skills necessary to do the job and be susceptible to corruption.

Tempering these concerns though, Nyayadhikaris can only impose a sentence of up to two years and the amount they can fine or grant in a civil case is capped as well. The District Court judge is given the responsibility to appoint a judicial officer to inspect Gram Nyayalayas in their district at least every six months. Both these measures are designed to limit the potential harm corrupt or incompetent Nyayadhikaris could do.

A party can appeal the Nyayadhikaris verdict to a sessions court judge for criminal matters which must be decided by that judge within 30 days. For Civil matters it goes to the District Court which must decide it within 6 months. Vitally, the Bill states there is no appeal past this stage (except in cases that involve a claim of a constitutional violation). Effectively, for almost all matters a Gram Nyayalaya can hear there is only one additional appeal you can make afterwards. This appeal is to the judicial officers who in the current system are generally the first to hear a case. Another layer to the judicial system has been added to screen off matters of perceived smaller importance and limit the ability of affected persons to appeal and clog the system at the High Courts and Supreme Court.

Many observers think Indians don’t litigate enough – i.e. there are many cases of wrongs that should be litigated that aren’t brought to the courts because of the clogged courts. 5,000 Nyayadhikaris is substantial, but probably not enough to take on all the current cases or the cases that aren’t being brought yet should be.

This system could work effectively if both the Gram Nyayalayas and the subordinate judges these cases will be appealed to were competent and clean from corruption. Yet, the track record for the subordinate judiciary in India is not perceived to be strong on either of these fronts. The worry is that persons will have fines or criminal sentences improperly imposed against them and find that their avenues for appeal have been shut past these often low level subordinate judicial officers. Even if the sessions court or district court judge is very talented, the time limits imposed for resolving an appeal may mean they can’t give the attention to a case it deserves and so leave many cases of injustice done by Gram Nyayalayas untouched. Two years’ imprisonment may not be the same as the death penalty or life imprisonment, but it’s still a long time to be wrongly put in jail. Similarly, even moderate fines can destroy many families’ savings in India.

Finally, even if all 5,000 Nyayadhikaris are appointed over three years, this still may not be enough to bring India’s judicial backlog under control. To give one a sense of the scale of this endeavor there are currently about 650 working High Court judges and almost 14,000 district judges, assistant district judges, magistrates and other judicial officers in the rest of the subordinate judiciary. Almost all observers agree that there simply aren’t enough judges in India for the cases currently in the system. Further, many observers think Indians don’t litigate enough – i.e. there are many cases of wrongs that should be litigated that aren’t brought to the courts because of the clogged courts. 5,000 Nyayadhikaris is substantial, but probably not enough to take on all the current cases or the cases that aren’t being brought yet should be.

Despite these concerns, we should watch the development of Gram Nyayalayas not only with some degree of skepticism, but also optimism. If the Act is well-implemented and taken in step with broader efforts to strengthen the lower judiciary, Nyayadhikaris could prove vital in bringing the rule of law to millions of Indians.

Nick Robinson is a Visiting Fellow at Centre for Policy Research, and teaches at the National Law School of India University, Bangalore.

Tackling corruption: is the infrastructure in place?

Speaking at the biennial conference of the CBI and State Anti-Corruption Bureaus, the Indian Prime Minister reflected on the ‘malaise of corruption’ that is ‘sapping our efforts to march ahead as a nation’. He spoke about the urgent need for tackling corruption immediately and effectively, and urged anti-corruption agencies to ‘make the cost of corruption unacceptably high’.

Effective enforcement measures are one small element of a wider strategy to tackle corruption. As the PM argued, the primary purpose they serve is to create an environment of deterrence, in the absence of which corruption becomes a low-risk activity. It is for this reason that we ought to pay some attention to the effectiveness of our current institutional structure for tackling corruption.

The problem is the long delays in disposing of corruption cases – a result of failures within our judicial system.

At the Centre, corruption cases against senior public officials are handled by the Central Vigilance Commission (CVC). The CVC is a statutory body with substantial independence. However, its role is merely advisory, and this is its greatest weakness. The CVC has no powers to take action when its recommendations are not complied with. Not surprisingly, there are many instances of non-compliance. According to the CVC’s latest annual report, 225 cases imposing major penalties on officers were not complied with.

Additionally, every government department is entrusted with the specific responsibility of investigating vigilance cases for which Chief Vigilance Officers (CVO) are appointed. Delays in filling CVO positions are common. Moreover, these posts are usually occupied by officials within the department who handle vigilance responsibilities part-time. This seriously undermines the objectivity and autonomy of the vigilance officer in conducting inquiries.

An interesting feature of the anti-corruption system is the presence of Lokayuktas (ombudsmen) in many states. The idea of creating an ombudsman was first proposed by the Administrative Reforms Commission in 1966. Since then, 17 states have set up Lokayuktas headed by retired judges. But most Lokayuktas are ineffective as they have no independent authority to undertake investigations, and have limited resources. Moreover, the Lokayuktas have no authority over other vigilance agencies such as the anti-corruption bureau.

The greatest strength of the current system in India is the considerable autonomy accorded to the CVC. This was the result of a 1997 Supreme Court judgment that ordered the CVC to be transformed into a statutory body.

When they do get reported, anti-corruption cases suffer from inordinate delays in investigation and convictions. According to the CVC, investigations can take anything between six months to three years. Conviction rates are dismal. A recent World Bank study reports that in ten years Rajasthan managed to convict a mere 411 public officials for corrupt practices. Part of the problem is the long delays in disposing of corruption cases – a result of failures within our judicial system. In 2005, Orissa had over 1,800 cases pending in trial courts. Unconscionable judicial delays meant that 12% of the defendants were dead before their cases came to court!

What can be done to reform our anti-corruption systems? Strengthening the powers and resources available to vigilance agencies both at the center and states is the first obvious step. The Karnataka Lokayukta and Andhra Pradesh Vigilance Commission are two examples where this has been done with considerable success and resulted in increased convictions.

The judiciary can play a role in initiating these reforms. The greatest strength of the current system in India is the considerable autonomy accorded to the CVC. This was the result of a 1997 Supreme Court judgment that ordered the CVC to be transformed into a statutory body. To ensure autonomy, the court directed that the CVC be appointed by a committee which includes the President and the leader of the opposition. Similar interventions can go a long way in strengthening vigilance agencies across the country.

Yamini Aiyar is the Director of Accountability Initiative, and Senior Research Fellow at Centre for Policy Research

AI’s New Working Paper – ‘Enhancing Accountability in Public Service Delivery Through Social Audits: A Case Study of Andhra Pradesh, India’

Accountability Initiative’s new working paper examines the effectiveness of social audit as a tool to enhance accountability.

Using a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods, Ritesh Singh and Vinay Vutukuru measure the impact of social audits on the implementation of National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, the flagship employment guarantee program of of India, in the state of Andhra Pradesh.

The main research questions addressed are: what is the impact of social audits on the size of the program and the payment process? Are social audit results a good indicator of the overall quality of program implementation? How does the performance of Karnataka, a neighbouring state, which has not taken up social audit, compare to that of Andhra Pradesh in the overall implementation of the program? And what are the reasons behind the successful scale up of social audits in Andhra Pradesh?

The results show that there is a statistically significant improvement in the size of the program as measured by the mandays generated. There was no statistically significant improvement in the proportion of timely payments, which can be attributed to technical problems in scaling up the payment process. It was found that the qualitative reports provided useful inputs on the process related aspects (performance of functionaries, maintenance of muster rolls etc) that were missing from the quantitative performance reports. It was found that the program is not in a very stable position in Karnataka, given the fact that there has been a decrease in the size of the program in the current year, and a comparison with Andhra Pradesh would not be a fair. An important insight was that the social audit program generated a great deal of public support in Andhra Pradesh, as manifested by the huge turnouts in the sub-district level meetings, which resulted in political support cutting across party lines. Another critical strategy was co-opting the lower bureaucracy in the entire process, so that there were no major problems during roll-out.

The overall conclusion is that social audits are indeed an important tool in building social awareness which results in a greater demand for work which translates into increased size of the program. The process also exposed corruption in the implementation of the program and a total amount of Rs 20 million of program funds was recovered.

The paper recommends that the Andhra Pradesh experiment with social audit can be replicated elsewhere in the country, provided that the learnings from its example are internalized, the program is launched in an incremental manner, and political issues generated by the process are carefully handled. It is specifically recommended that the Government of India should finance a pilot social audit project in two districts in each state of the country, roughly modeled on the Andhra Pradesh example. The states could then do a comprehensive roll out across all districts based on the state-specific learning from the pilot projects.

The paper can be downloaded by clicking here.