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Jayanti S. Ravi
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While India scores high on the democracy scale, often given the startling election verdicts and such indicators,the country is becoming more and more difficult to govern. Political parties seem to increasingly depend on factors like caste and religious identity and go in for populist schemes and policies to woo their vote banks.
Ever since independence, most Government programmes have focused on eradication of poverty. Jawaharlal Nehrus speech at the Constituent assembly, New Delhi on 14th August 1947 stated that independence is but a step, an opening of opportunity, to the great triumphs and achievements that await us (
) the ending of poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity.
The Human Development Report, 2005 ranks India at the 127th position out of 177 countries in the Human Development Index, which is a measure of life expectancy, school enrolment, literacy and income. In the Human Poverty Index(HPI) which measures human poverty in developing countries, India ranks 58th. Based on data available from the National Sample Survey (NSS) Consumer Expenditure Surveys, the reduction in poverty at the national level has decreased from about 54.1 per cent to 27.1 per cent in 20001. This clearly brings out the point that while the issue of poverty eradication needs a great deal of attention at policy level and their effective delivery and implementation, particular attention is needed in respect of the dimensions of human development such as life expectancy, school enrolment, literacy, among others and income.
For several decades after Independence, the approach of a direct attack on poverty was implemented by specific anti poverty schemes with a focus on employment generation with a focus on income and food intake. Schemes related to food such as the Public Distribution Schemes, Mid-Day Meal Scheme and the Integrated Child Development were introduced. However, the nineties saw a shift in the conceptualisation of poverty, moving towards human development including education, health, drinking water, housing and rural roads with a focus on empowerment. While India scores high on the democracy scale, often given the startling election verdicts and such indicators,the country is becoming more and more difficult to govern. Political parties seem to increasingly depend on factors like caste and religious identity and go in for populist schemes and policies to woo their vote banks. The approach that is really needed is one of increasing expenditure in the social sectors. The National Common Minimum Programme has underscored this and there has been a significant increase in the budgetary allocations in sectors like Elementary Education, Nutrition, Health and Rural Development (Table 1).
If the rhetoric of making a dent in the quality of life of the masses is to be made a reality, these measures also ought to be supplemented by complete decentralisation and a major transformation in the delivery mechanism and governance. One of the several measures that are urgently to be put in place relate to decentralisation. The others are related to good governance with attributes like participation in the political process, civil society aggregation in the political process, government stewardship of the system as a whole, policy implementation, particularly the bureaucracy, relationship between the state and the market, dispute resolution, particularly the judiciary.(2)
Table 1: Change in budgetary allocation
New Page 1
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Scheme/Item |
2004-2005 (Expenditure) |
Actual Allocation 2005-2006 |
| Rural Development |
6408.00 |
10000.00 |
| Rural Health |
8679.29 |
10686.00 |
| ICDS |
2155.60 |
3685.00 |
| SSA |
4753.63 |
7800.00 |
| MDM |
2739.50 |
3345.50 |
Accountability, transparency and peoples participation are also of immense importance. In the new paradigm of the Right to Information Act (RTI), this assumes significance as it can be a great empowering tool. A host of information is mandated in the act that ought to be thrown open in the public domain on a pro-active, suo-moto basis in all Government offices ranging from the Central Government to the State Governments to the Local Self Government Institutions (LSGI). Besides, monitoring of outcomes and mechanisms to measure human development snapshots across units of LSGI also ought to be in place. This will help in taking stock of where we are and then chalk out he trajectory and move ahead in a participatory, transparent manner. For all these interventions suggested, ICT becomes a very powerful tool and catalyst of change. Given the sheer size, scales, geographical distances and the acceptability of this tool as is amply demonstrated by a large number of ICT initiatives spread across the length and breadth of the country, this is, clearly, the most appropriate choice. The striking commonality emerging from these works is that isolated, piecemeal interventions are not likely to make a dent on citizen empowerment or rural poverty. Instead, a whole package of simultaneous and well coordinated, sustainable, interventions using ICT across the entire country in all the development sectors, are needed. In order to be sustainable, it is also imperative that these are not typical Government owned and run interventions, but leverage full participation of the private sector, particularly the rural SHGs and entrepreneurs in a PPP mode.
Decentralisation
Several empirical studies on the working of LSGI like Gram Panchayats have brought out that Gram sabhas were regularly held only in a few places, often only on paper, and in most cases, participation in gram sabha meetings was low. On a recent visit to Village Churuva of Block Bachrawan in Rae bareli district (northern part of India) of Uttar Pradesh, it was found that the elected lady Panchayat member was not aware of details of development works being undertaken.( 3) The criterion for the selection or rejection of beneficiaries is not clear to the poor and is often manipulated by the village chief and/or officials. The quality of delivery of benefits to the poor was low and leakages ranged from 20 to 70 per cent. Most elected officials had the propensity to make money, and almost in all cases, Panchayat sarpanch/beneficiaries paid commissions to officials. Panchayats in a large number of cases are busy implementing construction works, which thrive on the contractor/labourer basis and so not directly benefit the real poor and needy. This further supports the vicious nexus between the elected Sarpanches, the block engineers and contractors. Panchayats are not active in education, health, SHGs, watershed, nutrition, pastures and forestry programs, which require people to come together as equals and work through participation and consensus (4).
The smallest unit of democratic decentralisation in the country is the Gram Panchayat. LSGI have, over the years, slowly strengthened themselves and are poised for complete decentralisation by devolution of funds, functions and functionaries as stated in the Common Minimum Programme. While the modalities for this are being worked out and there are critics who endlessly cite examples of failures of LSGI, the fact remains that there are success stories and instances where the quality of life in the village has perceptibly improved by many notches, given the leadership and focused intervention of the Gram Panchayat, with support and trust of the Gram Sabha. While such success stories are documented and case studies written on the how and why of such transformation, there is no systemic approach available today for measuring or quantifying the accomplishments of village Panchayats across various indicators. If such a mechanism were available, it would serve as a gauge to measure the performance of the Panchayats, across the board, which can be placed before the people of the village. It can also be put in the public domain for the consumption of Civil Society, Markets and most significantly, Governments-both Central and State, to monitor the efficacy of various schemes and programmes towards fulfillment of objectives and attaining outcomes. The Government can also use this measure of development and encourage the Panchayats to sustain their improvements.
Given this background, it is suggested that a method of evaluating the performance of the Panchayats on a yearly basis based on both the feedback of the citizens and certain objective parameters as outlined below can be started. Once this system is accepted, well established and very importantly, made available in the public domain, it will tremendously empower the people, who could then demand that schemes and programmes meant for the poor actually reach them. A possible way of going about this is outlined below:
Panchayat metric grid
The X-axis could look at the fulfilment or non-fulfilment of the basic functions of the Panchayats as perceived by the citizens in the Panchayat. The Y-axis could look at attributes such as those listed below:
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How participative is Gram Sabha (representatives of women, Dalits, minorities, STs etc,)
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Functioning of lights
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Encroachments
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Management of Common Property Resources (CPR)
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Regular holding of Gram Sabha and Panchyat meetings
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Attendance in Gram Sabha
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Number of court cases and litigations (Inverse Correlations)
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Number of Self Help Groups (SHGs)
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Agricultural productions
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Increase in wages
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Reduction in poverty
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Utilisation of resources (Timely)
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Quality of Work done
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Improvement in social and development indicators such as immunisations, public distribution system, food for work programme, enrolment in school etc.
Giving a weightage to each of these items, the Panchayats could be graded on a rank of I to V, where I denotes the best category Gram Panchayats while V denotes those Gram Panchayats that really need drastic improvement. The X axis could be based on a citizen report card and marks are to be given by the citizens every year in respect of parameters reflecting :
(i) Development
(ii) Participation and conflict resolution
(iii) Infrastructure
(iv) Regulation
(v) Financial performance
(vi) Innovation and quality of implementation.
Based on marks given by citizens, the Panchayats could be graded from A to E, A representing the best and E the one needing most improvement. Yet another innovative intervention that is strongly suggested relates to the measurement of indicators related to the quality of life , on the lines of the human development report. Development Radars could be used for the purpose.
Development radars: Towards outcome orientedness
It is suggested that the mechanism or tool of development radars be used for this purpose. These have been in use by the Planning Commission to prepare the National Human Development Report-20015, where the development radars for the different states of the country have been drawn and ranking of states carried out. On a similar basis, if basic data from a source such as the Census were disaggregated upto the granularity of Gram Panchayats, it would be possible to construct Development Radars (DRs) for each Gram Panchayat. These DRs are a pictorial depiction of the performance of a Panchayat in respect of various sectors such as health, education poverty alleviation, drinking water, pucca house, to name a few. These development radars are snapshots of the position of a Gram Panchayat at a point of time, which can be redrawn at any other point of time and the difference of improvement measured. These DRs can also be compared across two different points of time and across two spatially different Panchayats. While the authenticity of the data is not questionable, it is suggested that initially the DRs constructed may also be vetted with ground level indicators to establish its primacy as a reliable construct.
It may take a year or so for this system of depiction to get acceptance and be understood for good implementation. Once these radars become an integral part of the Panchayats, they can be widely used for many purposes, including measuring the efficacy of various interventions, as the basis for the content of various capacity building initiatives, the starting point for taking stock of the current status of the Panchayat and chalking out a plan by constructing a projected Development Radar (DR) that the Panchayat seeks to attain. At the time of planning, if the Gram Sabha were shown the DRs and if the proposed DR for the next year and over the next five years were constructed based on the targets and goals of the village, this could be the starting point for discussion in the Gram Sabha. This improvement can be achieved by translating these incremental changes into tasks, interventions and initiatives, which would form the basis for the Village Plan. Such plans at the village Panchayat level can be aggregated into Block (or taluk/Tehsil), District and State Plans, eventually. It can also start serving as a kind of report card of where the development parameters of the GP stand today, vis- a-vis where they stood ten years ago.
Role of ICTs in this scenario
The World Development Report (1998) has made an attempt to highlight information as an intangible and important input to combat poverty. The World Development Report states that mechanisms for aggregating and dissemination of information are inadequate for targeting the benefits to the poor. To a great extent, the faulty identification of beneficiaries can be attributed to the poor information and communication facilities in rural India. This, in turn, leads to poor monitoring and evaluation of various schemes and programmes aimed at improving the quality of life of citizens. It is equally true that the technological options available today are robust and sturdy to be able to successfully collect, compile and analyse data and information. Similarly, ICT tools have also facilitated tools and techniques available for diagnosis and effective and optimal planning using appropriate resources. Given the poor quality of life and equally bad deprivation , some immediate interventions are urgently required across the 2.41 lakh Panchayats6 of the country. ICT is the only tool which can step in not only to fill this gap across geographically spread out areas but also across the large volumes and numbers of transactions, given the sheer size of the country.
India has emerged as software giant in the last decade. But information continues to remain a scarce resource for common masses. Partly the blame lies on low literacy levels but more on the flow of information, which usually remains with the power centres in rural society, namely official agencies and the rich class. Whether Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) can contribute to rural development beyond the obvious income effects generated by software exports is no longer the question. The real question is how to make this happen in a simple, orchestrated manner across the entire country. Of course, the efficacy of this tool directly depends on how ICTs can transform the delivery mechanism and network communities and groups to share knowledge. Policy initiatives to bridge the digital divide in India may considerably help in directly reducing the deprivations associated with poverty. For example, empowerment, gender equity, better access to agricultural market information or to government services may be relatively more valuable for poor people who cannot afford to use traditional communications media, or to pay for the services of traditional facilitating intermediaries. In fact, as outlined in this article, if the two interventions of developing Panchayat Metric Grids and Development Radars are employed for all the 2.41 Lakh Panchayats of the country using ICT both for developing these frameworks and disseminating these, this in itself can be a first significant step in the great leap forward in empowering the people, particularly the poor and ushering in processes that will certainly lead to their complete development.
Footnotes
1 S.D. Tendulkar, Economic inequalities and poverty in India in Kapila (2002).
2 Goran Hyden and Julius Court, 2000 UNU- World Governance Survey.
3 Based on interactions with a young, Dalit lady member of the Panchayat, Smt. Rajwati and the other villagers, it was clear that there was no transparency or right to information in the village- even the elected dalit member is not aware of basic details like the cost of the work, number of man days, etc.
4 Realising the Potential of Panchayats for Community Empowerment Naresh C.Saxena and Jayanti Ravi, April 2004.
5 State of Human Development (Source: Development Radars National Human Development Report 2001.)
6 http://panchayat.nic.in/pris.htm
Author: Jayanti S. Ravi is Director, National Advisory Council, Government of India.
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