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| It’s all in the outcomes | ||||
| Why the Planning Commission must learn to function as a fire alarm | ||||
| Anand P. Gupta | ||||
The Government of India has decided to initially focus this extremely important initiative on its flagship programmes, namely Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme, Mid-Day Meal, Integrated Child Development, National Highways, and the components of Bharat Nirman. A new entity called the “Programme Outcome and Response Monitoring Division” has been created in the Planning Commission to manage this initiative. In his article, ‘Bridging the gap between outlays and outcomes’ (The Sunday Express, September 4), N.K. Singh has raised the issue of what exactly this new entity will do: will it be a police patrol or a fire alarm? (Police patrol suggests that the auditor keeps an eye on things that go wrong and verifies that money has been spent, while the fire alarm requires certification on implementation to meet beneficiaries’ expectations. Beneficiaries can raise a fire alarm if the programme has either failed or has failed to benefit them. The fire alarm, then, needs to be heard.) I believe that the new entity should be a fire alarm. Indeed, it will be good if it goes beyond that. Let me elaborate. Outlays do not necessarily mean outcomes. The people are concerned with outcomes. The Planning Commission’s Programme Outcome and Response Monitoring Division can play an important role in ensuring the delivery of the outcomes the people are concerned with. But in order for this to happen, this newly-created entity will need to, one, examine the available evidence on the intended outcomes of each of the above flagship programmes, identify the gaps, if any, in this evidence, and take cost-effective measures to fill these gaps; two, raise the fire alarm for any failure in achieving the intended outcomes; three, investigate what caused the failure; four, develop a strategic action plan, including the requisite incentive-creating, institutional-strengthening and capacity-building measures for correcting the failure, and agitate for its implementation by the concerned ministry or department; five, monitor the action plan’s implementation; and six, subject the action plan’s implementation to an independent, rigorous evaluation. Take, for example, the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS). The Outcome Budget: 2005-06 has budgeted an outlay of Rs 3,685.30 crore for this programme. Although the Government of India started this programme way back in 1975, as many as 47 per cent of India’s children in the age group 0-3 are still underweight. This is the average for the country, with substantial inter-state differences: while the figure for Punjab is 29 per cent, that for Bihar is 54 per cent. Why is Bihar doing so badly? A recent World Bank study provides an answer to this question. According to this study, the ICDS programme coverage and funding is regressive across states in India. In Bihar, where as many as 54 per cent of the children in the 0-3 age group are underweight, only 32 per cent of the villages are covered by the ICDS programme, with only Rs 25 spent by the Government of India per underweight child, whereas the numbers for Punjab are 29 per cent, 70 per cent and Rs 334 respectively. The study also reveals that whereas Punjab spent 98 per cent of its ICDS allocation, Bihar could spend only 76 per cent. Given these revelations, one may argue that the Planning Commission’s Programme Outcome and Response Monitoring Division must agitate to make the ICDS programme coverage and funding progressive across states in India. But this alone may not necessarily produce better outcomes. Something more may be required. In order to know what else may be required, the Division will have to track ICDS expenditures in selected districts of Bihar, including the district with the highest prevalence of underweight children. How does a given district spend its current ICDS allocation? Does it receive the allocation at the right time? If not, why? Does it “park” its ICDS allocation in, say, a personal ledger account? If so, why, and what really happens to this money after it is so “parked”? How much of the ICDS money is misused or diverted to unrelated activities? What is the structure of incentives governing the behavior of those responsible for managing the ICDS allocation? Does the district in question have the capacity to effectively spend a substantially larger ICDS allocation? What are the perceptions of the intended beneficiaries about the ICDS programme? Responses to these questions will allow the Planning Commission to understand the ICDS situation at the micro level. The Commission will then know why an outlay on the ICDS programme in a district may produce the intended outcome, but an equal ICDS outlay in another district may fail to produce the intended outcome. What is more, armed with the responses to the above questions, the Commission will also be in a position to develop a strategic action plan, including the requisite incentive-creating, institution-strengthening and capacity-building measures, for efficiently converting ICDS outlays into intended outcomes. The action plan may differ from one district in Bihar to another.
The writer, currently director of Economic Management Institute, New Delhi, was professor of Economics at IIM, Ahmedabad | ||||
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