Blog Post Year: 2010

Data Matters: Linking Development Data to Government Performance

How come the government gets away with putting out data that is often inconsistent?  How come our politicians get away without having to justify their ‘performance’ in any tangible way when they seek re-election?

Let us look at the two worlds — first, the world of government data: The data that government collects is mostly used for administrative reasons — tracking, checks and balances, etc.  Most of this data is often locked up in files. There are often large variations in government data on the same parameter when accessed from two different sources within government.  The Right to Information is an important tool to get data out, but the bottom line in the government is that there still remains an absence of a culture of openness.

Second, the world of our politicians.  Politics anywhere is fiercely competitive.  As we have seen over these past few days, it appears to be especially so in Karnataka!  But the competition in our politics is a raw quest for power.  And we all know there is something fundamentally wrong with this.  What if we are able to get politicians to compete on real issues?  What if they are forced to refer to facts and figures in specific terms when they reach out to the people for re-election?

The work of IndiaGoverns really focuses on getting tangible data on performance as put out by government to matter to politicians and politics in the country.

As a starting point, we have taken the data from government sources in Karnataka at the local level, and organised it along MLA constituency boundaries.  Based on this, we have prepared one page reports on Education Indicators, and have sent it to MLA in the state. (Please see http://www.indiagoverns.org/summaries/ to access the reports.) We have chosen data for education for a year which is even before this set of MLAs was elected in 2008.  Our next report on education will be current, and will show the progress during his tenure.

The real challenge for us is to reach such data to citizens, NGOs, local journalists.  And even to politicians in the state who have lost elections.  Such data should become useful for all stakeholders to take up progress in the constituency using tangible data.  And the MLA should defend his record of progress in various sectors during his tenure as MLA.  Of course, the MLA can also use such data to ask for more government allocations if his constituency has a poor track record on any development issue. We are working on similar reports for health, water, etc.

We invite your suggestions, but also any concrete steps you can take in helping with dissemination of such information widely.

Veena Ramanna is the Executive Director of the IndiaGoverns Research Institute. You can find out more about the Institute’s work at http://www.indiagoverns.org/.

 

The RTI Act Turns 5

The cornerstone of the UPA government’s agenda when it was elected to government in 2004, the RTI Act celebrates its fifth birthday today, 12 October 2010.  Some might say that five years is not a long time in the history of a law, but perhaps no other legislation has captured the imagination of the public in quite the way the RTI Act has. Today, the right to information or “Soochna Ka Adhikar” (as it popularly known) has made its way into the everyday lexicon of most Indians. A recent study conducted by RAAG (Right to Information Analysis and Assessment Group) estimates that some 2 million RTIs were filed across the country in the first 3 years after the Act was passed (RaaG, 2009).  That’s a lot of RTIs! People have filed RTIs to redress individual grievances, probe government policies and decisions, expose corruption and misuse of government resources and  access their basic entitlements whether its ration cards, wage payments or driver’s licenses. At the Accountability Initiative we’ve used the RTI extensively to get budget and expenditure related data on centrally sponsored schemes and to get information on how department’s are complying with the RTI. We are also currently undertaking a small research study on the kinds of information people are seeking under the Act. We hope this analysis will help in identifying people’s information needs and assist departments in responding to these needs proactively.

The RTI Act is a powerful tool which if used effectively can help bring in greater transparency and accountability in the functioning of government. But, the Act’s five year journey has not been without incident. As early as 2006, the government made attempts at trying to amend the RTI Act to exclude key provisions from public access. Though civil society groups successfully stalled such efforts to amend the Act, the issue is still very much alive. The Department of Personnel and Training (the nodal agency implementing the RTI Act) in recent months has confirmed that the government is considering amending the law to exempt “file notings” and “frivolous and vexatious” requests for information. Sources within the government state the amendments are necessary since departments cannot cope with the growing volume of RTI requests they are receiving. However this has more to do with the lack of adequate infrastructure and human resources in departments.

 Amendments to the RTI have not been the only roadblock on the Act’s journey. In recent weeks, RTI activists have questioned the lack of transparency in the selection and appointment procedures of Information Commissioners in the country.  The recent appointment of AN Tiwari to the post of Chief Central Information Commissioner following the retirement of former Chief CIC Wajahat Habibullah has been severely criticized not only because Mr Tiwari is shortly set to retire in December but more so because the post of the Chief Information Commissioner is not intended to be a promotion post for other commissioners within the department. In other states as well, Information Commissions have increasingly become post-retirement hotspots for bureaucrats. The lack of transparency in the procedure for selecting information commissioners is a worrying trend and threatens to undermine the efficacy of an institution set up to champion and defend the RTI Act.

 At yet another level, governments at various levels face a number of challenges in implementing the RTI effectively. Over the past few months, I’ve interacted with officials implementing the RTI Act in different departments in the Central government and Delhi government. Across the board they have the same stories to tell: departments lack the infrastructure, staff and often even space to effectively implement the RTI Act. Public Information Officers are overburdened and have little training on how to respond to RTI requests and receive little support from senior officials. The poor state of government records makes responding to RTIs a difficult and cumbersome task. These factors combined mean that government compliance with the RTI Act at various levels remains patchy, uneven and often half-hearted. While the officials I’ve interacted with have all unanimously agreed that the RTI Act is a welcome change, the general picture that seems to be emerging is that departments at various levels have not set in place the administrative machinery and infrastructure to effectively and efficiently implement the RTI Act.

The way I see it, the RTI is like any other service delivery system except that information is the key public good being provided. Citizens file RTI requests with government departments who are obligated to provide this information within a particular time frame. But this service delivery system is only as good or as efficient as the different links in the assembly chain.  It’s really quite simple. What do you get when you have departments that are overburdened and undertrained with limited access to resources? A system which is basically inefficient and unresponsive. Evidence of this non-responsiveness is there for all of us to see in the growing pendency rate of complaints and appeals in Information Commissions across the country. If cases are likely to take up to a year or more to be heard, people are going to lose faith in the system and the RTI Act more generally.

 Amending the RTI Act merely a stop gap measure aimed at pacifying certain key factions within the bureaucracy and will not address the serious implementation issues cropping up. The real need of the hour is for governments at various levels to seriously commit themselves to implementing the Act more efficiently.  As they say, where there is a will there is a way.

Mandakini is a Research Analyst with the Accountability Initiative.

Why do politicians transfer bureaucrats?

Elected politicians and bureaucrats are important pillars of governance. In India and in many other countries, politicians have very limited powers over the bureaucrats, at least in theory.  For example, a politician in India does not have any control over the recruitment of  IAS officers. He can’t change their wages, can’t dismiss them nor demote them. In some sense, this is desirable, to avoid the politicization of policy implementation. But then the question arises: how would a politician facing electoral pressures ensure that his pet projects are being implemented by the bureaucrats over whom he doesn’t have any control. Of course, a politician can offer the bureaucrat, non-monetary incentives or can pick somebody who shares his world view.

I just came across a very interesting research paper by Laxmi Iyer and Anandi Mani, (‘Traveling Agents: Political Change and Bureaucratic Turnover in India’, November 2009), which explores the phenomenon of the power of politicians to transfer the bureaucrats to retain control over them.

Transfer of bureaucrats by politicians is not something unheard of, at least in India. Some of our Chief Ministers are actually famous for their tendency to transfer bureaucrats. This has prompted demands to put explicit limits on the politicians’ ability to transfer bureaucrats before they complete, say, at least two years of service in that position.

The authors build a theoretical model, based on some realistic assumptions in the Indian context. A noteworthy feature of the paper is that the predictions of the model are empirically verified by using a very unique dataset on the career histories of 2800 IAS officers between 1980 and 2004, combined with data on political changes in major Indian states over the same period, proxy measures for bureaucrats’ ability, and a measure of the relative importance of different posts as viewed by the bureaucrats themselves. I won’t go into details about the data. But it’s worth reading to see the efforts taken by the authors to collect such unique data.

What are their findings?

First, they find that IAS officers are indeed transferred quite frequently. Over the period of 1980-2000, the probability that an officer gets transferred is 53%. The average tenure of the IAS officers is merely 16 months.

Secondly, consistent with the hypothesis that the politicians use transfers as a control mechanism, they find that the average rate of bureaucrat transfers increases significantly, by 10% over the baseline of 53%, when there is a new Chief Minister. Most of these transfers take place in the first four months after a new CM takes over.  Further, a CM who comes to power along with a new party in power, is twice as likely to transfer bureaucrats than a CM who comes to power without a change in the party in power.  The majority of such transfers are what authors call ‘lateral’ transfers, i.e. not accompanied by promotion. Thus, these transfers are not for a reward for past performance or routine promotions that merely coincide with a new CM coming into the office.

The bureaucrats with a higher ability invest more in developing expertise, they undergo longer durations of training over the course of their entire career. These officers are also significantly more likely to be recommended for senior positions in the central government (‘empaneled’).  But there is another way of obtaining important positions- by being ‘loyal’ to specific politicians. The authors find that the officers are more likely to be appointed to important positions when they belong to the same caste as the CM’s party base.

Disturbingly, the average importance of the posts held by an officer over the course of his or her career does not vary significantly with his ability– the officers with high ability are no more likely to be assigned to important posts than other (say, loyal) officers.

May be it’s time to pressurize the political establishment to pass the ‘Public Services Bill’, which stipulates that the bureaucrats can’t be transferred before completion of at least two years in that position. No wonder, only eleven states in India have agreed, while ten states have refused outright!

Assessing the pension scheme for unorganized sector workers

Social protection programmes have in the past (to a large extent) excluded the most vulnerable section of the Indian workforce; the unorganized sector. On 26th September the government sought to overturn this long-standing tradition by extending pension benefits to 85% of the workers who find employment in this sector. The scheme titled  ‘Swavalamban’(meaning self reliance), covers unorganized sector workers between the ages of 18-55 years. This implies that any worker between the ages of 18-55 years can become a subscriber and is liable for receiving  pension at the age of 60 years.

The Swavalamban scheme is essentially a contributory scheme which provides for a minimum monthly contribution of Rs 100 and a maximum annual contribution of Rs 12,000. The Union government on its part shall contribute Rs 1000 per year. The scheme shall be administered by the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRD), which shall oversee the overall management, while the deposits shall be managed by private fund managers. The private fund managers shall be able to invest only 15% of the total funds in equity markets while the rest shall be invested in high quality fixed income securities such as government bonds. Upon attaining 60 years of age, subscribers will be able to withdraw 60% of their contribution, while the balance 40% will be given as monthly annuity by LIC (Life Insurance Corporation of India).

Sounds reasonable? Cynics might be tempted to ask—where is the glitch? While it may be too early to point out any glitches, some challenges and issues come to mind.

  • The scheme treats all workers as a homogenous group: It defines unorganized workers as those who are either not currently employed by the central/ state government or by any other autonomous or public sector undertaking of central government and those who are currently not covered by any of the existing social security schemes. This definition while inclusive spans all categories of workers from self employed professionals to Rickshaw Pullers and Construction Workers. The scheme does not appear to be tailored to consider the stratified nature of the conditions of work. Which begs the question of whether the scheme can be appropriate for such a large and heterogeneous group?
  • It assumes that workers will have the ability to save: the emphasis on regular monthly contribution assumes that workers will have the ability to contribute on a regular basis. This represents an important challenge given that one of the distinguishing features of the unorganized sector is irregularity of work which often impairs the ability to save. According to a report by NCEAR, the bottom half of the population by income distribution are responsible for only 2% of the savings in India (2000). Moreover savings by the poor are also mostly of a short term nature and are stored in instruments and assets having high liquidity. It remains to be seen whether the scheme will be able successful in promoting thrift and encouraging a shift from long term to short term savings.
  • Concerns of accessibility: For workers to gain maximum benefit, it is necessary that the scheme be structured in ways such that the cost of participation is low, i.e. the scheme should be accessible to workers both geographically and in terms of simplicity of procedures.  These are issues which are particularly relevant to workers employed in this sector, given their low levels of education and relative isolation from formal institutions and processes (especially financial institutions) (NCEUS Report, 2007). How the government plans to address the gaps in accessibility remains to be seen.

Gayatri Sahgal is a Research Analyst with the Accountability Initiative

 

CPWD, PWD, NDMC, DJB – Multiple agencies but no accountability!

Every year it’s the same story. The monsoons hit Delhi and life in the city comes to a grinding halt. For a city that so craves the rain every summer we are remarkably unprepared for it. Traffic snarls, blocked drains, flooded roads, power outages and road collapses make for an unpleasant experience. Couple these with the inevitable dengue, malaria and viral fever outbreaks and you’re in for a pretty rotten monsoon. And then there’s the Commonwealth Games…well I think enough’s been said on that front.  I don’t know about you, but I’m getting a little tired of the déjà vu. I mean we all know the score. Delhi + Monsoons X Flooding, Road Cave-ins, Disease etc = Chaos. Check. Okay so maybe we had record rainfall this year and the Yamuna is flowing at an all time high, but still, shouldn’t government agencies at various levels be prepared for this?

The problem isn’t so much with the rain as it is with the structure of municipal governance in the city.

  •  Multiple agencies: Mind bogglingly, Delhi has over a 100 civic agencies tasked with overseeing municipal services such as land usage, roads, transport, water, electricity, sewage and flood control etc. These agencies include the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD), the New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC), the Delhi Cantonment Board (DCB), Delhi Jal Board, Delhi Development Authority, Central Public Works Department (CPWD), Public Works Department (PWD) etc.  What makes things even more complicated is the fact that these agencies report to different ministries and departments.
  • Dual Jurisdiction: Unlike other metropolitan cities in the country, Delhi has the dubious distinction of being the seat of both the Union Government and the Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi (GNCTD). In practice this makes for a pretty complicated administrative set-up with some parts of the city under the administration of Central Government agencies and others under the Delhi government. So while agencies such as the MCD, DDA, Delhi Police and CPWD are answerable and accountable to the Central Government, the PWD, DJB and Delhi Transport Corporation (DTC) report to the Delhi Government.  This makes for confusing and parallel structures of governance where it’s unclear where the jurisdiction of one government starts and the other ends. This duality has for long been exploited by various agencies to pass the buck.
  • Overlapping responsibilities: It’s often said that too many cooks spoil the broth and it couldn’t be truer than in Delhi. From water, public works, sanitation, land, you can be pretty sure there’s more than one civic agency involved.  Here’s a quick snapshot of the extent to which this is true.

 

Civic Agencies providing basic services in Delhi

 
Service Urban Planning & Development Roads Water & Sanitation Land

(Residential & Industrial)
Departments Responsible DDA

MCD

NDMC

CPWD

 

 CPWD

PWD

MCD

NDMC

Cantt. Board DDA etc.

 Delhi Jal Board

MCD

DDA

NDMC

 DDA

CPWD

L&DO

DSIDC Govt of Delhi

MCD

NDMC

Cantt Board.

 

 

  • No answerability or accountability: What do you get when you have multiple agencies responsible for the same services and reporting to different departments? No answerability and no accountability. The current CWG fiasco is a prime example where each agency blames the other. So we have PWD faulting the quality of CPWD construction work and the NDMC complaining the MCD isn’t doing what it should to keep the city free of dengue and malaria. As agencies play pass the parcel, Delhi’s residents are left wondering who to hold responsible.

Theory suggests that strengthening accountability relationships between citizens, service providers and policy makers is critical to ensuring the effective delivery of services. But that can be hard to do when there just is not enough information available about who’s supposed to do what. So if you’re not sure who is responsible for road construction and maintenance in your neighbourhood, it’s not going to be easy to pin them down and hold them accountable. Thus, in the context of public service delivery, access to better information is increasingly regarded as a key step towards strengthening citizen claims of accountability on service providers and policymakers (World Development Report 2004, Making Services Work for Poor People).

The RTI Act instrumentalises this approach by requiring all public authorities to proactively disclose 17 categories of basic information on their websites and through other means. This includes information about their organisational structures, budget, directory of officials, projects, annual plans etc.  In practice this means agencies such as the MCD, PWD, NDMC, CPWD etc should be disclosing proactively information about the various public works that they are involved with on a regular basis. Sadly, Section 4 disclosure continues to be poorly implemented by most of these agencies. Scroll through their websites and the information you’re likely to find the information is usually out of date. Ensuring better and more effective information disclosure by municipal agencies is one way of ensuring that agencies perform the functions they are supposed to.  The Central Information Commission has been pushing for stronger implementation of Section 4 of the RTI Act for the last few months with interesting results. It recently issued orders to municipal agencies in Delhi to disclose detailed information on the contracts issued to consultants for projects under the Commonwealth Games. In a rare instance, the NDMC has complied with the CIC’s orders and put up a detailed list of consultants hired to carry out CWG work  (click here to read the information disclosed by the NDMC).

There is clearly a need for broader municipal reforms in Delhi to streamline the provisioning of services and responsibilities of agencies. But as is the case with all major governance reforms – that’s likely to take a while! In the meantime, pushing for better information disclosure by municipal agencies may be one way of bringing in greater accountability and transparency.

Mandakini Devasher is a Research Analyst with the Accountability Initiative.

 

Budget Manual released by Ministry of Finance

The Budget Division of the Department of Economic Affairs, Ministry of Finance, has released a Budget Manual. This is a first of its’ kind document that is expected to serve as a reference material not only to the officers involved in the Budget process but other users and interested stakeholders as well.

The Budget Manual is a comprehensive document which captures the content of the Union Budget as well as the procedures and activities connected with the preparation of the Annual Budget. The processes and guidelines have been simplified and put in a logical sequence for easy comprehension.

Click here to view the Budget Manual in .pdf form.

 

Right To Know Day, 2010: 5 Billion Now Have Right To Information

Over 90 countries representing nearly five billion people have now adopted laws or national regulations on RTI. However, over half the countries of the world have not yet adopted RTI laws and many that have done so have failed to implement them adequately. There have also been efforts in several countries to weaken laws.

ARTICLE 19 offices and staff are participating in events in eight countries including Bangladesh, Kenya and Mexico to celebrate Right to Know Day 2010 , and have issued a statement of some of the RTI advances and setbacks over the year:


RTI Advances
– New Laws and Recognition. The number of jurisdictions with RTI laws continued to grow. Over the past year, new laws were adopted in Liberia and Bermuda. Many others have improved their laws. In Australia, the archaic Freedom of Information Act, 1982 was substantially amended and improved. The Organization of American States adopted a model RTI bill for adoption across the Americas and the Caribbean. The adoption of related laws also continued to expand – in Uganda for example, a comprehensive whistleblowing law was adopted.

– Constitutional Rights. Increasingly, countries are including RTI in new constitutions. In the past year, the recently approved Kenyan constitution includes substantial RTI provisions while Article 19 of the Pakistani constitution was amended to include RTI. A decision in the Canadian Supreme Court fell short of fully endorsing RTI as a constitutional right. Now, over 80 countries recognised right to information as a constitutional right.

– New Bills. There are more efforts in countries around the world to consider RTI laws. In total, over 50 countries have proposals to adopt laws pending. Some of the more recent efforts include Argentina, Bhutan, Pakistan, Senegal, Sierre Leone, Spain, Ukraine, and the Malaysian state of Selangor.

– Environmental Information. The right to environmental information was strongly advanced as a global right during the last year. The UN Environmental Programme (UNEP) released new global guidelines for the development of national legislation on access to information, public participation and access to justice in environmental matters in June 2010. World leaders in December agreed to The Earth Summit 2012, which may lead to a new global treaty on access to environmental information.

– Open Data. Both the US and the UK governments launched new open data sites to make raw datasets of public information available for the first time. This allows for the public to do its own analysis of policies and expenditures. In the UK, this included detailed spending information.

– World Bank. The World Bank transparency policy released in December 2009 substantially improves the transparency of the Bank. While it is not perfect, there is hope that the policy will set the standard for other international financial institutions.

RTI Setbacks
– Stalled Campaigns. Legislation in Brazil and the Philippines reached the final steps but due to lack of political leadership, both failed at the last hurtle and will have to be reintroduced next year. Efforts in Yemen, Cambodia and Vietnam have also faltered due to lack of political will. There has been no repeal of the infamous Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act in Zimbabwe following the change in government there.

– National Security. New secrecy legislation proposed in South Africa in the last year would seriously undermine RTI. Anti-terrorism laws are repeatedly used to justify hiding public information and harassing the media.

– Failure to Implement. Many countries have adopted RTI laws over the last few years but have not seriously implemented them. The laws in Angola and Uganda have not been substantially implemented. There are continued efforts by government officials in India to amend the excellent Right to Information Act in order to weaken it.

– Development. The Millennium Development Goals (MDG) summit recognised the importance of transparency and the free flow of information as a central tool in promoting development and achieving the MDGs but failed to substantially include requirements for it in the action plan.

– Climate Change. Freedom of expression and access to information was severely limited at the failed Copenhagen Climate Change Summit. The resulting Copenhagen Accord failed to include substantial transparency rights essential to ensuing adequate public participation.

 

Debate on the UID: Share your views!

 

Accountability Intitative invites your views on the UID, on the brink of its first roll out in rural Maharashtra. We welcome comments on any aspect of the UID– its’ implementation, design, flaws, potential, constitutionality; as well as any relevant links or media you may wish to share. 
The launch of the UID has led to a flurry of debate amongst policy-makers, legal experts and civil society at large; often surfacing in polarizing editorials and sometimes in press conferences calling for its’ halt. Today’s conference at the Press Club in Delhi was held by a coalition of civil society groups opposed to the UID, organized under the banner Campaign for No UID. The coalition asserts the project has been initiated without any prelude: “there is no project document; there is no feasibility study; there has been no cost-benefit analysis; there are serious concerns about data and identity theft… [the project] has proceeded so far without any legal authorization, on the basis of an executive order, that could change the status of the people in this country.”
Nandan Nilekani, chief of Aadhaar, says the UID will “provide an identity to those who need it most”, and answers comprehensive questions in this interview on the benefits of the UID. However, others such as Jean Dreze, economist and NAC member, have claimed Aadhaar is “a national security project in the garb of a social policy initiative”. Inevitably there are concerns over privacy and data protection, with calls for a privacy Bill to counter the supposed legal and constitutional vacuum in which Aadhaar is currently placed, and predictably at least one writer has evoked Orwell. However, others claim the security provided to 600 million poor outweighs the philosophical and intellectual concerns over privacy that are limited to sections of liberal civil society. Critics also allege that the reason why Aadhaar is selling itself to millions of poor in the country is to create a foundation of legitimacy to deflect concerns over it being misused, technologically unproven and costly, as well as to piggyback on schemes like the NREGA and the PDS. The debate extends across citizen-State relations, privacy, finances, and operations. 
 
Also, Aadhaar will go beyond just providing “a 16-digit identification number for every Indian”. and is pitched  to handle projects as diverse as a national-highway toll-collection system, a technology backbone for the forthcoming Goods and Services Tax (GST) and reform of the vast public distribution system(PDS) for subsidised food. Nilekani runs a team of 120 people with the task of assigning unique identities to 1.2 billion people. These people form a small-smart-fast-flat team that runs Aadhaar. Is this model effective, and as some say an organisation that is a precursor to tomorrow’s government? 
 
All comments will be moderated.

Obama’s speech to the UN: US support for Open Govt

On September 23, President Obama spoke before the UN General Assembly highlighting his administrations’ open government initiatives and continuing commitment to transparency and open governance globally. Click here to read President Obama’s speech.

Here is a brief summary of the success of these initiatives, adapted from the Fact Sheet: U.S. Support for Open Government available on The White House website:

• Data.gov has democratized access to data, with hundreds of thousands of datasets in a common format housed in a central location. Approximately 270,000 datasets have been posted, providing the public with unprecedented transparency about such diverse matters as automobile safety, air travel, air quality, workplace safety, drug safety, nutrition, crime, obesity, the employment market, and health care.

• Numerous dashboards – from information technology (IT) to health care to forthcoming regulations – now give the public information with which they can hold both private and public institutions accountable. Through Recovery.gov and the information technology dashboard, the public can track how and where Recovery Act funds are spent, down to specific zip codes.

• About 30 agencies have developed Open Government web pages and Open Government Plans, announcing new steps to disclose information that has never been public before and new ways to encourage public participation in agency activities.

• The SAVE (Securing Americans’ Value and Efficiency) Award, allowed Federal employees to submit ideas on how to make government more efficient and effective. The Administration has also launched Challenge.gov to enable all government agencies to tap the creative and entrepreneurial spirit of the American people and collaborate to solve our nation’s problems. • The White House has established a clear presumption in favor of openness by posting visitor records, staff financial disclosures, salaries, and ethics waivers on the White House website for the first time and by reversing prior limits on access to presidential records and ordering Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) reform. The Department of Justice’s FOIA dashboard will enable users to assess FOIA compliance across 92 Federal agencies and over time. We are also holding ourselves accountable by putting Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (EESA), Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), and stimulus lobbying records online.

Is JSY Having an Impact? A Rigorous Evaluation

The National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) is the Government of India’s flagship program for rural health. Among its various components, the ‘Janani Suraksha Yojna’ (JSY), roughly translated as ‘Safe Motherhood Scheme’ aims to encourage women to deliver their babies in medical facilities by providing cash incentives to these women.

Why is the JSY important:

Every year, more than 500,000 women die from causes related to pregnancy and child-birth (UNICEF (2008)). More than 99% of these deaths take place in developing countries. India alone has 22% of the global total. The pattern is quite similar for infant mortality. Most maternal deaths are related to obstetric complications- including post-partum haemorrhage, infections, eclampsia and prolonged or obstructed labor. Some 86% of the newborn deaths are the direct results of the three main causes- severe infections, asphyxia and preterm births. Infections include sepsis/ pneumonia, tetanus and diarrhea. The above facts suggest that delivering a baby in a medical facility, under the supervision of a skilled medical professional can make a significant dent in the instances of maternal and neo-natal mortality. Providing cash incentives was thought of as a faster way of encouraging women to come to the medical facilities to deliver their babies, thereby reducing maternal and infant mortality.

 

JSY:

The JSY is a conditional cash transfer scheme– a woman is paid money if she delivers her baby in a medical facility- in government health centres, like subcenters (SCs), Primary Health Centers (PHCs), Community Health Centers (CHCs) or general wards of district or state hospitals, government medical colleges or accredited private institutions. As of today, the JSY is one of the largest conditional cash transfer programs in the world, with the number of beneficiaries jumping from a mere 7 lakh in 2005-06 to almost 92 lakh in 2009-10.

The NRHM has divided states into two categories- Low Performing States (LPS) and High Performing States (HPS), depending upon the pre-program level of institutional deliveries. The LPS are those where the proportion of the institutional deliveries is very low. The initial set of eligibility rules, uniform across the whole country, was issued in April 2005. According to these rules, only those women who were of 19 years of age and above, and belonged to the below poverty line (BPL) families, were eligible for benefit under the JSY. The benefit was restricted to the first two live births. These eligibility rules were deemed to be too strict, especially in the LPS, and hence, new guidelines issued in late 2006, removed these restrictions in the LPS only. The amount of financial assistance was also extensively modified.

The original and modified level of financial assistance is shown below:

 

Original Level            Modified Level

Rural            Urban             Rural            Urban

LPS       700                600             1400               1000

HPS      700                 NIL             700                600

 

The nature of the scheme indicates that the women in the LPS should benefit more from this scheme, as compared to the women in the HPS. Hence, if the data shows that the proportional increase in the institutional deliveries is higher in the LPS, one can say that the JSY is having an impact on increasing institutional deliveries, provided we control for other factors.  In technical terms, this is called a ‘Difference-in-Difference’ estimation.  As part my doctoral thesis, I used the Reproductive and Child Health-District Level Health Survey (1998-99, 2002-04, 2007-08 rounds) data to investigate this hypothesis. The results were interesting.

 

Result 1:

 Combining 2002-04 and 2007-08 rounds gives us the sample of women who have given birth in the period 1999 to 2008. My analysis found that  in the initial year and a half after the launch of the scheme (from mid-2005 to end 2006), the gap in the proportion of institutional deliveries between the LPS and HPS widened. But after this, the LPS have started performing better- the proportion of institutional deliveries is increasing more in these states compared to the HPS.

This result is not implausible. As discussed earlier, when the scheme was launched, the eligibility criteria were uniform. The HPS, due to their better administrative capacity might have been in a better position to utilise this scheme. But once the eligibility restrictions were relaxed, the women in the LPS started benefiting in large numbers as well.

 

Result 2:

To check if there are any pre-existing trends in the institutional deliveries, I combined 1998-99 and 2002-04 rounds. This gives us the sample of women who have given birth in the period 1995 to 2004. Analysis of this data indicates that the proportion of women delivering in medical facilities increased more or less at similar rates in the LPS and HPS before the scheme was launched. Thus convergence can’t explain our previous result.

 

Result 3:

 To check whether availability and access of medical facilities have changed, I used the village data from the rounds 2002-04 and 2007-08, which has information about the presence of various medical facilities/ service providers in the village, and if a particular medical facility is not present, then it provides the distance to the nearest such facility, whether these facilities are accessible throughout the year.

 

The analysis of data indicates that there has been no differential increase in the availability of subcentres, primary health centres, government dispensaries, private clinics, AYUSH, and mobile health clinics in the LPS after the launch of the NRHM/ JSY. Similarly, there has been no differential change in the access to community health centres, district hospitals, and private hospitals. The only exception to this is ICDS, i.e. Anganwadis whose availability and access have improved a great deal in the low performing states. Given that the main task of the ICDS is to provide nutritional and health services to children in the age-group of 0 to 6 years, ICDS are unlikely to have a large effect on the institutional deliveries. This shows that the increase in proportion of institutional deliveries in the low performing states is unlikely to be driven by differential changes in the access and availability of medical facilities.

 

Conclusion:

 The JSY is one of the most important components of the NRHM, and one of the largest conditional cash transfer programs in the world. Given that there has been hardly any systematic evaluation of such an important scheme, these results are quite significant, and provide the first rigorous evidence of the effectiveness of the scheme.