2010 Archives - Page 5 of 13 - Accountability Initiative: Responsive Governance

Global Right to Information Index: Open to comments

The Global RTI Index–a new tool to compare and contrast right to information laws, indicating strengths and flaws–is under development by Article 19. (Article 19 is an independent human rights organisation that works globally to protect and promote the right to freedom of expression.)

As several RTI laws have been adopted across the world over the past decade, the Global RTI Index will be a valuable tool to evaluate these laws and better understand their structural strengths and weaknesses. Advocates, policy makers and researchers can use the index to make international comparisons of legal provisions and examine a cross-section of experiences. Article 19 is building on a pilot project in Mexico (2009) to release an updated methodology for testing national RTI legislation.

Comments from the RTI community are being accepted until 31st October, 2010, so that feedback can be incorporated into the design of the tool. Suggestions for improvement and comments can be sent to rti@article19.org. The organisation calls for the following areas to be considered: weighting, exemptions, categories of affirmative publications, and outside laws.

Taking the “Common Man” out of the Commonwealth Games

(Image copyright, The Hindu)

Avani Kapur

No, this is not another blog about Commonwealth Games (CWG) bashing. I think we have had enough of those, and with the media talking about it nearly every day, I think Delhites are a bit tired (at least I am!!). This is instead meant as homage to the faceless people who have sacrificed everything – from their home, livelihood, to even their lives and those who have travelled thousands of kilometres and worked relentlessly through the rain in trying to get Delhi “ready” for the games and to save “our national pride”.

Anyone who has crossed Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium (JNS) late at night would have seen labourers hard at work, precariously balanced high on top of the stadium buildings, without any safety equipment. On the 26^th of August, one such worker died in an accident – the death went unreported. And this is just one of many. According to an affidavit submitted by the Delhi Metro authorities, 109 people have died in the construction sites of the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation and 45 people have died working for the CWG directly.

In January 2010, Peoples Union for Democratic Rights ( PUDR) along with two other organizations filed a Public Interest Litigation in the High Court (HC). The Court appointed a four member Monitoring Committee to look into the matter. In March 2010, the Monitoring Committee came out with its report, where it concluded that the “allegations made by the petitioners are well founded.”

The table below highlights some of the violations as reported by both the PUDR as well as the Monitoring Committee report. For more details on each of these reports please see here and here.

However, despite the HC order on the 7th of April, according to the PUDR no mechanism has been devised to ensure that the recommendations of the Committee are taken into account and worker rights continue to be violated. And to make matters worse, this is not the first time that Courts have intervened for the rights of workers working on game sites. Nearly 2 decades ago, the Supreme Court in People’s Union for Democratic Rights vs. Union of India [1982 SCC (3) 235], popularly known as the Asiad case, had castigated the government for the pitiable condition of workers engaged in construction work and in a landmark judgment the SC had stated, “The poor too have civil and political rights and rule of law is meant for them also, though today it exists only on paper and not in reality.” It had further stated, “… where a person is made to work for less than the minimum wages, it would be considered forced labour as required by Article 23.”

Apart from the gross violations of the rights of workers, the CWG has also had a devastating effect on the rights, livelihoods and housing of numerous slum dwellers. A study undertaken by the Housing and Land Rights Network highlights the significant long-term negative social and economic impact in Delhi due to the CWG. The report states that more than 3 lakh slum dwellers have been evicted in Delhi since 2003 in the run-up to the games on the pretext of beautification drives and urban renewal. For instance, in June 2009, a slum cluster near a drain behind JNS was demolished by the MCD, which included over 50 people suffering from a high degree of disability that had been living in the slum since 1998-1999. This area is being “beautified” to make way for a parking lot for the CWG.

Similarly, with complete disregard of the UN Basic Principles and Guidelines on Development Based Evictions and Displacements, on December 24, 2009, a night shelter for the homeless at Pusa Road Roundabout was demolished, leaving 250 homeless without shelter in the bitter cold. Two homeless people died due to the cold.

In another incident, a slum cluster of 368 families of Dalit Tamil at Jangpura Barapullah Nullah was bulldozed on April 15, 2010 to construct a parking lot for the Games. Even with regard to children, a report released by the NGO, Child Rights and You (CRY), found that children of over 400,000 construction workers at the CWG sites are deprived of basic rights like sanitation, schooling and healthcare. And the list goes on and on…

This is by no means surprising for most of us. In fact, Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dixit had acknowledged that, “We will have about 30 lakh homeless in the city after the Games.”(Outlook, April 2010). Yet, surprisingly, apart from the reports published by PUDR and HRNL, there is relatively very little outcry or even media attention given to these facts.

With less than 2 weeks left for the games, irrespective of how the events turn out –the next time we are stuck in our cars in a traffic jam, cursing the Games, the Delhi Government, the corrupt officials etc, lets spare a thought for those who have lost more than we can imagine to make OUR lives a little easier in the end.

Avani Kapur is Senior Research and Program Analyst at the Accountability Initiative.

One World Trust: Accountability tools

The One World Trust and the International Research Centre of Canada have created a new online accountability database. At present, the database has an inventory of around 200 tools, standards and processes. The dynamic interface and varied search functions allow users to focus on accountability issues that interest them and the system generates ideas (supported by sources and further reading) to improve accountability in this area. The database is continually growing and evolving as users comment on existing tools, add new tools, and provide further links and analysis.

Click here to access the database!

What prompts collective action for accountability?

What prompts collective action for accountability? Information campaigns are premised on the assumption that information can act as a catalyst for mobilizing collective action. Yet, experience suggests that these links are neither implicit nor automatic. For instance, a recent evaluation by J-PAL MIT, of an information based education intervention to mobilize village education committees in Jaunpur, Uttar Pradesh explored this question to find that information campaigns had no visible impact on community involvement in public schools and no impact on learning outcomes in those schools. The study proposes several reasons for this failure including the challenges of coordinating and sustaining collective action in a large group, the expectations people had about the efficacy of the Village Education Committee (VEC) and the possibility that people do not care enough about education.

Our Sehore experience offers some interesting insights in to why people do not come together (although we learnt very little about why people do come together). First, we found that there is a widespread perception amongst parents that monitoring the school and demanding accountability for teaching is simply not their responsibility and it is this which creates the first barrier to effective collective action. Interestingly, the villages we worked in had never had a community discussion about education till we parachuted in. This is not to say that parents do not care about the education. The very fact that they send their children to school is evidence that they care. But parents seem to feel that sending their children to school is the extent of their responsibility and what happens inside the school is not something they are in a position to assess or influence owing largely to a sense of disempowerment and lack of confidence owing to their own illiteracy. In the many meetings and informal interactions we tried to instill a sense of ownership for the school by drawing attention to the fact that parents pay for the school directly through the education cess. On other occasions we drew analogies with parental behavior when children are sick arguing that in dysfunctional schools result in ‘sick’ children and just as parents ‘act’ by taking their sick children to the doctor, they ought to act when the school does not function. It is unclear whether any of these ‘mobilization’ tricks had an impact but what the experience did teach us is that there is a need for greater investment in creating parental ownership towards the school and its everyday activities.

Second, and perhaps more important, we found that the greatest barrier to collective action is that parents simply do not believe in the efficacy of the Parent Teacher Associations (PTA’s) or other community based forms of participation. And this is probably a consequence of bitter experience. I have mentioned in a previous blog the story of Dhaba where the PTA came together and took a decision to fix a leaky roof with their school grants. But the school grant arrived much after the monsoon and the PTA found that it had very few avenues to go to in order to resolve this problem. So where’s the incentive to participate?

And it is not just about money. Parent Teacher Associations (and Village Education Committees and other similar organizations) simply have no teeth. For instance, it is widely acknowledged that the largest problem face by India’s elementary education system is teacher absenteeism and poor teaching quality. Yet, critical powers related to enforcing teacher accountability whether its appointment of teachers, distribution of salaries, imposition of penalties on errant teachers and so on are vested in the state administrative machinery. And as we know, the state administrative machinery is too far removed and has almost no incentive to regularly monitor teachers and hold them accountable for performance. So even if a PTA wanted to do engage with the school and demand accountability, in the current system they have no powers to do so. So why should they bother? Would you?

In this context, Geeta Kingdon makes another interesting observation. She argues that the large socio-economic distance between teachers and the general population can also make it difficult for mobilizing collective action through the PTA’s. Kingdon estimates that in a state like Uttar Pradesh, post the implementation of the 6^th pay commission, the ratio between teacher’s salaries and state per capita income is 17:1! Since rural per capita GDP is even lower than average state per capita GDP, the distance between teachers and parents in rural areas is probably even higher. In such a situation is collective action for teacher accountability even feasible?

What the Sehore experience taught us is that the mere creation of local participatory institutions and provisioning of them with information does not in itself result in effective participation. Micro level participatory spaces like PTA’s need to be nurtured, resourced and empowered in order for them to mobilize collective action. More importantly they need to be embedded in a larger institutional structure where the entire delivery mechanism is geared to be responsive to PTA’s so that PTA’s have incentives to participate and engage with the government.

Yamini Aiyar is Director of the Accountability Initiative.

Linking outlays to outcomes in Education

By 2009, India has succeeded in enrolling 95% of all children in the elementary school going age into school. This is an impressive achievement. Thanks to a decent rate of growth and political commitment to address poverty, overall expenditures on programs like Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan have been increasing. There is today a government primary school within one kilometre of almost every habitation in the country. The education cess was introduced about six years ago. People paid up willingly. Overall, this has been a good decade for elementary education in India.

Around 2004-2005, the then newly elected government made statements about the importance of linking outlays to outcomes. This was an important policy stance for India given that large outlays were being made in the social sector and that effective delivery of basic social services was a high priority for the new government. But accompanying these policy statements, there was no effort made by the government to make information available to the public to enable citizens to link outlays to outcomes. So the question is, with increases in allocation; by building schools in every habitation and by enrolling our children into schools, have we achieved the desired outcomes?

The first ASER – the Annual Status of Education Report was born in 2005 in this context. People wanted to take a look
themselves to see what the status of children’s education was – and see what the “aser” was of the outlays in elementary education. In ASER for the first time, in each rural district in the country, local groups began to visit villages and talk to
families and children. Hundreds and thousands of children were given a simple paragraph and asked to read. They were given simple arithmetic problems and asked to solve them. As a country we listened to them as they read or they tried to read. Putting together the data for all rural districts we came to the conclusion that only half of all children in Std 5 could comfortably read Std 2 level text.

The ability of children to do simple arithmetic tasks was even worse. This meant that after 5 years in school, 50 percent of children in India were at the level expected after 2 years in school. Nationally, in five years, from 2005 to 2009 this trend has not changed much. Available information including findings from ASER brings out the basic characteristics of elementary education in rural India. Enrollment is very high. Schools are available within striking distance of most habitations in the country. So outlays are translating into inputs and infrastructure. But outlays do not seem to be going all the way to generating desired outcomes. At least as far as learning outcomes are concerned, the level is inadequate and the pace unsatisfactory. Children learn slowly. For many it is too late to have a fighting chance of completing eight years of schooling in a meaningful way. In many fundamental ways, the Indian school system is in a “big stuck”.

Where we are “stuck”? Children learn many things in many places and in many ways. However, one important and
common site where children are expected to learn is in school. Regardless of language or context or location, we commonly expect that is a child goes to school, he or she will definitely learn reading and arithmetic. Teaching learning
processes can be complex and difficult to measure. But for ordinary people who are paying taxes and cess, what are features of schools and school functioning that can be easily observed and tracked?

ASER makes basic observations in schools. But these observations have a difference. We do not just count teachers, we look to see if they are coming to school. We do not simply ask if there was midday meal in school, we observe to see if the midday meal has been served in school on the day of the visit. Similarly, we note not only if there are taps, handpumps and toilets, but also see if there is water in the taps that we can drink and toilets that are being used. A quick look at schools indicates that while many inputs are there, much more needs to be done to make the inputs useable and facilities function well.

In ASER 2009, a new component PAISA was introduced to understand money. Like the other components of ASER,
the first step was at the ground level. In every sampled village in the country, a government primary school was visited. Questions were asked about how much money came to the school, when did it come and how was it spent. Interestingly, many teachers in schools did not know how much is to come and what they can do with it. The PAISA component of ASER is the first time a national attempt has been made to understand fund flows at the ground level.

ASER is a beginning. There are many challenges that lie ahead. The big question is: why are we in this “big stuck” and how can we get out it? To do this we need to understand the pathways by which allocations translate to action. We have to be able to track goals and their links to plans, decision making, allocations, expenditures to processes and outcomes. Each district in the country makes an annual work plan for elementary education. How do these plans define and articulate outcomes to be achieved? How much money is allocated to what? How does it flow and how is it spent? Does the level, type and pace of expenditure link with changes in outcomes? Not only are these questions important, but it is also essential to develop simple metrics and methods for measurement that can be used widely. We are hopeful that with each year, this citizens effort – ASER and PAISA – will go further and further in figuring out how to translate outlays to outcomes and how to bring our children to school and enable them to learn well.

Rukmini Banerji is Director, ASER Centre & Director, North India Programs, Pratham. The PAISA project is a collaboration between the Accountability Initiative, ASER Centre and National Institute for Public Finance Policy.

The long road to PAISA 2009

Do development funds reach India’s poor? Back in the mid 1980’s, then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi famously guesstimated that of every one rupee spent on development only 15 paise reach the poor. 25 years on, and despite significant increases in development funds, the story remains largely unchanged. Administrative inefficiencies, poor targeting, high implementation costs and leakages characterize the implementation of almost every development program and consequently only a small fraction of development funds end up reaching their final destination. This reality is perhaps the only point of consensus amongst India’s politicians, policy makers, bureaucrats and citizens. Although the problem is a well recognized one, there is surprisingly little data or analysis in the public domain on how development funds travel through the system and how much, in fact, reaches the poor. Even today, politicians and policy makers rely on guesstimates when they speak of problems with the country’s development funds. One primary reason for this lack of data is that the current administrative system is designed such that there are very few incentives in government to regularly analyze expenditures at the implementation level and even fewer to make this public. These limitations have seriously
comprised accountability.

Take the instance of Centrally Sponsored Schemes (CSS) that now dominate social sector spending in the country. Funds for CSS are released by the Government of India (GOI) to State Governments and other implementing agencies. When GOI releases funds, it considers its job done and treats releases as expenditures. There is therefore, a disconnect between the release of funds and actual expenditures on the ground. As a 2007 Planning Commission Working Paper pointed out, “the connection between release of funds by the central government and actual expenditures for physical inputs by the
implementing agencies is currently, very obscure.” In such a scenario, there are no incentives at the central government level to track expenditures to the point of implementation.

Interestingly, the Government of India’s budget documents do not even report on actual expenditures at the level of implementation. Data on expenditures can be found in the annual audited accounts of the Government but these have a two year time lag and are rarely available in the public domain. From time to time the Comptroller Auditor General (CAG) undertakes performance audits of CSS’s. Although these reports are publically available performance audits are sporadic and not done for all CSS’s. Importantly, even here disaggregated expenditure data is only available up to the district level and not below. In the last few years, the Government of India (and many state governments) has been working to put in place Management Information Systems (MIS) for many CSS that are aimed at making expenditure data available to the public in real time. However, as we discovered when we ploughed through these data bases, the quality of data is very poor and not regularly updated. Additionally, with a few exceptions, these data bases are not disaggregated below the district.

So where does all the money go? And as citizens of India, how can we find out and hold government accountable for this money? In early 2009, the Accountability Initiative, National Institute of Public Finance and ASER Centre joined hands to answer this question. Initial investigations resulted in the formulation of PAISA (Planning, Allocations and Expenditures, Institutions: Studies in Accountability), India’s first and only citizen led effort to track development fund flows at the point of implementation. To start, this exercise is focused on elementary education and more specifically the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan (SSA) but the intention is to expand this work to other development programs as the projects. PAISA’s specific point of investigation is the school grants in SSA2. School grants account for less than 10 percent of total SSA allocation. Despite their small size, PAISA chose to focus its analysis on these grants for a variety of reasons.

First, school grants are the primary funds that reach the school bank accounts. Second, school grants are meant to be spent on school infrastructure and are thus critical to the day to day functioning of the school. And third, school grants are meant for all elementary schools in country. Tracking these grants would thus allow for cross statecomparisons.PAISA began its first round of investigations with a district wide study in Nalanda district, Bihar in March 2009. The
survey was timed to catch the end of the financial year (the financial year closes on March 31st) to enable tracking and
analysis of the progress of funds through the year. Data was collected from a sample of 100 schools in the district
over a 3 day period. The results were unsurprising but shocking, nonetheless. Out of 100 schools sampled, nearly
a quarter of the schools had not received SSA grants even at the close of the financial year. For those that had
received money, delays were common. Most schools reported receiving the first tranche of funds only in October
– one semester in to the school year. Irrespective of when funds arrived, expenditures were incurred somewhere
between January and March – the last semester of the school year. Grants reaching late and problems with the
school bank account were the main reasons for delayed expenditures.

The Nalanda experience clearly highlighted that fund tracking at the school level is indeed possible and necessary. By simply tracking fund flows for one financial year, PAISA could help identify the extent of the problem, and the kinds of bottlenecks schools encounter on a day to day basis. The next step for PAISA was to experiment with taking the survey to a nationwide scale through ASER 2009. Simplicity is the key to a national level survey. To this end, efforts were made to convert the PAISA tool in to a simple, accessible and easy to use tool. The ASER survey is conducted by civil society groups across the country. Making PAISA the first and only citizens audit of public funds reaching elementary schools. The PAISA 2009 report is the outcome of this first-ever nationwide exercise.

The PAISA survey aims to answer the following questions:
(a) Does money reach schools? i.e. do schools get their grants?

(b) If so, when do schools get their money? i.e. do grants arrive on time?

(d) How much information do key stakeholders – headmasters, regular teachers or para teachers – have about monies that reach the school?

(e) Do schools spend their money?

(f) What is the outcome of this expenditure?

The PAISA survey covered a total of 14,560 primary and upper primary schools. Of these only 1405 schools did not provide surveyors with any information on school grants which is less than 10 percent of the total sample. The survey results at the aggregate, national level highlights some interesting truths:

(a) Schools receive their grants but rarely on time: More than two-thirds of all schools surveyed reported receiving grants in the full financial year from April 2008 to March 2009. Among the three, more schools reported receiving the TLM grant (which goes directly to teachers) than the other two. But grants do not arrive on time. When the survey was conducted in
October 2009, at least 40% of schools had not received grants for the financial year 2009. Less than half of upper primary schools reported receiving the SMG and SDG in the first half of the financial year 2009-10.

(b) Even when money reaches schools, they do not always get their full entitlement: 45% schools reported receiving all the three mandatory grants in 2008-09. 20% did not receive any grant. 35% schools reported receiving one or two grants, but not all. One possible reason for this result could be the fact that respondents are not aware of the different types of
grants that school received and reported them as one consolidated figure.

(c) Not everyone knows about money in schools: PAISA found that Headmasters have the most knowledge about grants. In over 90% of schools surveyed, the regular teacher and the para teacher also have at least some information. However, their level of knowledge regarding the type of grant, amount of the grant and whether it has been received and spent vary
substantially.

(d) Money gets spent but in the last quarter of the financial year: The good news is that if and when schools receive their money they spend it. In 90% of the cases, schools reported that they were able to spend the money. However, this expenditure is normally in the last quarter of the financial year when the pressure to spend is very strong.

(e) Money gets spent but not always effectively: In terms of outcomes, on the positive side, over 80 percent of classrooms have a writeable blackboard and some form of charts, posters and other educational materials. However, less than half of the schools that reported receiving school maintenance and development grants had usable toilets, and more than 20 percent did not have a working hand pump. More than a quarter of schools that received the classroom grant in the financial year 2008-09 could not complete building it. In terms of physical infrastructure such as toilets, drinking water and civil works, therefore, the outcomes from the public expenditure elementary education are far from ideal.

So what does PAISA tells us? Money does reach but not entirely. Our calculations show that 85 % of grants reached
the schools out of the total amount that should have reached in accordance with school norms (n/b we arrived at this figure after minimizing reporting errors). Importantly, we found that even when funds reach their intended destination, delays are common indicative of deep-seated administrative malaise. And finally, there is the larger issue of how funds get used. PAISA suggests that there are significant gaps in the quality of expenditures. A finding that needs further analysis.

Collecting and analyzing data is a first crucial step. However, there remains the larger challenge of ensuring that data is used effectively both to unblock bottlenecks and to enforce accountability. PAISA is trying to do this in two ways. First it aims to provide data on implementation processes. Tracking fund flows is one way of doing this but going forward, PAISA will supplement this with an institutional analysis that will map administrative constraints and capabilities at the local level. Second, PAISA is trying to pro-actively feed data collected in to the local decision making process. To this end, PAISA has been involved in pilot efforts to disseminate information directly to Parent Teacher Associations and mobilize them to use tools and information to demand accountability for expenditures. Through this process it is hoped that information will also translate in to greater participation and therefore a more effective planning process, one that truly reflects people’s needs and demands.

So, where does PAISA go from here? After one long year of experimentation, PAISA is now set to expand is activities. The focus in the next two -three years will be on tracing funds from the district to the school to understand the entire chain of money as it flows through the system to reach its final destination. This it is hoped, will provide not just much needed data on money flows but also some insights in to the bottlenecks and administrative inefficiencies that have resulted in the current conundrum of increased allocations that never reach beneficiaries. This exercise will be undertaken in sample districts across the country. In addition, the annual ASER exercise will include a PAISA component where national level data on school expenditures will be collected. The key to PAISA is its simplicity, relevance and regularity. We aim to develop tools that can be used by anyone from experts sitting in Delhi to school committees in villages. To ensure relevance and regularity, we aim to produce our data in a manner that is understandable by stakeholders. In the long term
PAISA will expand beyond elementary education in an effort to develop innovative, practical and scaleable tools to track expenditures across all development programs and provide India with much needed data and tools to ensure that the government is accountable for all its development expenditures. Watch this space!

Yamini Aiyar is Director, Accountability Initiative, CPR. Anit Mukherjee is Associate Professor, National Institute of Public Finance and Policy.

Learning to Complain

Honk…. Splash…. Flooding…. Crawl… Blank…..Neon amiss….Frustration…. Underlining despair… Belied…Forgotten.

These are just some of the sights and emotions that we all encounter the moment we step out of that little island of comfort we call home. Whether it’s the frustrating and wholly unforeseeable traffic jams or the debiliting condition of roads which lend a whole new meaning to the term wear and tear, or even the whimsical traffic light whose temperamental nature inspires a host of caricatures (or maybe that’s just me!).

Such conditions appear to surround us all, but how we have been shaped by it? If our surroundings are governed by chaos then what is it most suitably captures our mental state… apathy, frustration, confusion or just plain helplessness? My many musings have led me to conclude that while we might experience different shades of these emotions what we really are is incapacitated. We appear to lack the basic capacity/ability to act, to change the very situation we find ourselves in. Academics classify this as a lack of agency but in my opinion its not just agency that we lack-we are stuck in this state of impotence, in which we are fundamentally attuned to the belief that things cannot change. The system or the lack of one is assumed to be so much more powerful than the individuals who comprise it; is imagined that it will never bend to their will. So while the so called powerless sections in our societies (farmers in Uttar Pradesh, Tribal’s in Orissa) launch protest marches and clash with repressive forces in staking their claims – we the privileged educated class sit back, circumventing on most occasions any and every direct engagement with the powers that be.

But if we aren’t revelling in this situation then the question arises whether we can actually do something to change it? Can we do something to demand what is classically and most nebulously defined as accountability? I believe we can. I don’t say this because of my innate idealism but out of some amount of experience in trying a variety of strategies, which despite not being entirely successful have been instrumental in shaking off that feeling of utter inertia. I realize that a lot of the strategies that I have tried are not entirely revolutionary but sometimes even the most basic attempts can make a difference. So try the following when you find yourselves confronting the maddening and the inconceivable, even if it seems lame and entirely uninspiring.

1) Stuck in a frustrating traffic light- call the traffic police just dial 100 and report the place of the jam. I have tried this and some times it has yielded surprising results.

2) Traffic lights not working- call the traffic police in this situation as well. I have found them to be extremely polite on some occasions. Sometimes they are just as lost as us.

3) Dilapidated roads- File an RTI with the concerned authority. In Delhi you can file it with the Department of Road Transport and Highways, Ministry of Shipping Road Transport and Highways, or with the Urban Development Department of the Delhi government. This is extremely easy as it costs only Rs 10 and the RTI can be posted through speed post.

4) Garbage piling up on the streets- File a complaint with the designated MCD office, if that doesn’t work file an RTI on the status of your complaint.

Its time we learnt to complain!

Gayatri Sahgal is a Research Analyst with the Accountability Initaitive.

Gaps in the Whistleblower’s Bill

The Public Interest Disclosure and Protection of Persons Making Disclosure Bill, 2010 (the Whistleblower Bill) has been tabled in the Lok Sabha (Lower House of India’s Parliament) yesterday (26th August 2010).

The Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT), Government of India, which piloted this Bill did very little to consult with people on its contents. They refused to publicise the contents of the Bill while formulating it despite being mandated to do so under Section 4(1)(c) of the Right to Information Act, 2005. During a full bench hearing at the Central Information Commission in my complaint case, representatives of the DoPT acknowledged that they had not disclosed anything about this Bill in the public domain. The Commission’s decision in this case is awaited.

Meanwhile the text of the Bill as introduced in the Lok Sabha is not available on the DoPT’s website, nor does the link to the text of the Bill on the Lok Sabha website work. The attached link for the Whistleblower Bill has been sourced from the website of PRS-India. Congrats guys, you have proven again that civil society puts information about public documents in the public domain faster than public authorities themselves.

The following issues have been highlighted CHRI’s preliminary analysis of the Bill (see attachment):

1. Limited coverage of reportable actions

2. Only one authority prescribed for receiving public interest disclosure

3. CVC permitted to disclose the identity of whistleblowers to the Head of the Department

4. Whistleblower Bill does not apply to the private sector

5. Armed Forces have been left out

6. Vexatious complainants will be imprisoned but no policy for rewarding whistleblowers

7. No clarity on the kinds of protection that a whistleblower is entitled to receive

Advocacy Recommendations:

Given the several major lacunae in the Whistleblower Bill introduced in the Lok Sabha, there is an urgent need to have this Bill referred to the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Personnel, Public Grievances, Law and Justice for detailed deliberations and improvement.

The DoPT has recently uploaded the complete text of the Public Interest Disclosure and Protection of Persons Making Dislcosure Bill, 2010 (Whistleblower Bill) on its website a short while ago. People have been invited to make submissions on its contents by 30th September.

It is rare for Governments to table a Bill in Parliament and then invite people to comment on it. Nevertheless this shows that the Government may be willing to consider amendments to the Bill. It is advisable to engage with this process. I request readers to send their analysis of the Whistleblower Bill highlighting other weaknesses. I am sure a more detailed examination will reveal more grey areas which need rectification.

For more email updates from CHRI on the Whistleblower’s Bill click here.

Venkatesh Nayak is the RTI Programme Coordinator, Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative

Transparency and Access to Information key to realising the MDGs

With only five years to go to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, 2010 is a critical year for countries around the world. While many countries have made significant progress towards reducing extreme poverty and hunger, providing access to clean water, improving maternal and child health, combating HIV/AIDs etc, such successes have been uneven across regions and countries. If countries are to achieve the 8 MDG targets by 2015, much more needs to be done. According to the UN MDG Goals Report 2010 “unmet commitments, inadequate resources, lack of focus and accountability…” are responsible for the shortfalls in the progress of many countries.

Prioritising and promoting transparency and the free flow of information may just be one way of fast tracking countries efforts to achieve the MDGs. This was the theme at a recent conference on “Transparency, Free Flow of Information and the MDGs” organised in London from 24-25 August 2010. Organised by Article 19 (an international human rights organisation promoting the freedom of expression and information), the conference brought together leading experts on the MDGs, development, access to information and transparency to brainstorm about how countries, donors, civil society organisations and activists can integrate transparency and access to information into global debates and efforts on the MDGs.

But, in what ways can encouraging the free flow of information really help?

Today there is a substantive body of literature which recognises the critical importance of access to information in enhancing citizen voice and people’s participation in government. Think about it: people need information in order to make informed decisions – whether it’s deciding who to vote for during an election or determining which government policies to support or resist. Access to information is also critical for strengthening accountability relationships between citizens, service providers and policy makers. The World Development Report (WDR) 2004 highlighted the importance of access to information in accountability relationships stating that:”….Better information – that makes citizens more aware of the money allocated to their services, the actual condition of services, and the behaviour of policymakers and providers – can be a powerful force in overcoming clientelist politics”. Put simply, if you know what your local MP is up to – how much money he received as part of his MP local area development fund and how he did (or did not) spent that money – you are better placed to decide whether or not to vote for him in the next election. Recognising the importance of access to information, countries around the world have enacted laws guaranteeing their citizens the right to access information held by the government.

So access to information is important. But how is it relevant to the MDGs?

For one thing there are a lot of people out there who simply don’t know about the MDGs or the fact that their countries have signed up to them. For instance, how many of us know about India’s progress on the MDGs? Setting in place systems at the country level to ensure that there is greater access to information about the MDGs is key to ensuring that there is public interest and oversight of a country’s efforts. Speaking at the London conference, NAC member and MKSS activist, Aruna Roy said: “My neighbours do not know what the MDGs mean. If they don’t know what the MDGs are, how can there be a demand for accountability? So the first demand is communication and information.”

Furthermore, there is not only a lack of awareness in many countries about the MDGs but a paucity of information about how countries are investing and spending to achieve these goals. This has been underscored by the preliminary results of the 6 Question Campaign. Launched in 2009, the 6 Questions Campaign is a first ever effort to test public access to budget information in different countries. From February – June 2010, civil society organisations in 86 countries asked governments a series of 6 questions on their budgets for the MDGs. The results are quite astonishing: out of 79 countries, 20-40% ignored the requests and refused to provide information; 10-20% said they did not have any information; 40% gave some information and less than 30% gave a proper answer. These results highlight the urgent need for budget transparency to determine how MDG funds are being utilized. According to Helena Hofbauer of the International Budget Project: “The UN does not require countries to say how much they are spending on reaching the MDGs. Without budget transparency, recharged efforts to win the MDG race will fall short. We must recognise that there are two problems: not enough money is being spent on achieving the MDGs, and resources that are allocated are being spent in an ineffective or inefficient way”.

Till date, discussions on transparency, access to information and accountability have been fairly peripheral to the debate on the MDGs. However, given the scale of challenges that need to be overcome by 2015, it seems clear that transparency and access to information are likely to be high on the agenda of the UN Millennium Summit next month.

Mandakini Devasher Surie is a Research Analyst with the Accountability Initiative.