For the last two months the Accountability Initiative team has been busy with the district level PAISA surveys. The district PAISA surveys are our first attempt to develop detailed district level report cards on the process of administering elementary education. Fund flows are the starting point and like the PAISA national report, the focus is on tracking the flow of funds at the school level to assess whether schools get their money, whether this money reaches on time, how this money is spent and whether these expenditures reflect school level needs and priorities. But Unlike the PAISA national report which only tracks fund flows for Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA), the district surveys track the entire gamut of monies that schools are entitled to. This includes state run incentive schemes such as scholarships and uniforms and would for the first time allow a comparison between implementation effectiveness of Centrally Sponsored Schemes and state schemes.

But our surveys are not restricted to fund flows and school level expenditures alone. The objective of this exercise is to unpack the process through which elementary education is administered on the ground. Thus our work includes analysis of the district level planning process (which determines expenditure priorities at the school level), the nature of the administrative set up at the district, block and school level including the hierarchies of decision making and the relationship that schools have with the local administration. It is our contention in PAISA that one of the key missing links to understanding accountability failures (and consequently the reasons why increased outlays have failed to improve outcomes), is an analysis of the process and mechanisms through which allocations translate in to actions on the ground. Such an analysis, we feel, is critical to understanding the specific points at which bottlenecks occur and accountability is compromised. Through this work, we hope to create an empirical base through accountability failures can be addressed.

Why does this matter? As I have argued before, it is a well acknowledged fact that India’s delivery systems are plagued with administrative inefficiencies that make accountability for outcomes near impossible. While this fact is well known, there is remarkably little empirical data on the specific nature of these inefficiencies. Even basic questions – like how much money reaches the ground have been answered through guesstimates- the most famous of these guesstimates is Rajiv Gandhi’s oft quoted comment that a mere 15 paisa of every rupee meant for the poor actually reaches them. But money apart, we know every little about how expenditure priorities are made, how the local administration makes decisions, the relationship they have with service delivery units and constraints and challenges faced at the local level. Curiously, this information is hard to access not just for citizens but also for policy makers and decision makers within the system. And so, plans are made without adequate data and consideration of local realities, needs and priorities. Consequently, we have a delivery system where annual plans are poorly designed, expenditure priorities are not grounded in local needs and inefficiencies of one year simply translate on to the next. We hope that our district surveys (and the reports that we bring out through these surveys) will be the first step toward filling this empirical gap.

In keeping with our objective of enabling change through wider citizen engagement, the survey is undertaken entirely by citizen volunteers from NGOs in the districts. The survey results will be out in October 2011. For the next few week the AI team will periodically update you on our experiences in conducting the survey. Watch this space!