Yamini Aiyar

Recently, in a move that has been rightly acknowledged as the first tangible step toward radically overhauling the Five-Year Plan process, the Planning Commission unveiled a new approach to the Twelfth Plan, aimed at making it an inclusive and participative process. To start, the commission has put together a strategy matrix for the approach paper and invited comments through its website. Efforts are also underway to “listen to and consult with citizens’” through civil society-led consultations across the country.

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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.

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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.)

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(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”.

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Yamini Aiyar

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.

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Yamini Aiyar and Anit Mukherjee

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.

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The Government of India has released the findings of the first ever survey of the Indian Civil Services. The report titled "Civil Services Survey - A Report" surveyed officers from all 3 India Services (The Indian Administrative Service (IAS), Indian Police Service (IPS) and the Indian Forest Service (IFoS)) as well as officers of 7 Central Services. In total, the Survey covered 18432 officers belonging to the ten selected services. Out of the total questionnaires sent, 4808 officers responded to the survey which is 26% of the total universe.  Read more »

 Avani Kapur

A few months back I was searching for release and expenditure data for Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA). Since the financial management section of the SSA portal hasn’t been updated in 2 years (the latest available information is August 2008!), I was left struggling to find places to look. Luckily, I remembered that we now we have a tool – the Right to Information Act – an easy method to get information.  So I decided to file my first RTI !

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Yamini Aiyar

This blog post is the first of a series based on experiences my colleagues and I had while implementing an information campaign on school expenditures aimed at mobilizing Parent Teacher Associations in a small cluster of villages in Sehore District, Madhya Pradesh (MP). The experience reinforced some of the fundamental contradictions in current systems of delivery and why accountability is near impossible. It also brought home the importance of giving greater discretion to communities to identify needs, direct expenditures and monitor implementation. Read more »

Sruti Bandyopadhyay

This post is an attempt to explain the process of law making in India. It also explains how citizen groups can participate in the process of lawmaking. 

Who makes laws?

 In India, at the central level, laws are formulated by the Parliament and at the state level by Legislative Assemblies and Councils.

How is a law made?

The process of enacting a new law can be broadly divided into four steps: Read more »