September 2010
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.
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:
Debate on the UID: Share your views!
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:
Is JSY Having an Impact? A Rigorous Evaluation
Ambrish Dongre
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.
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.)
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”.
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. Read more »
What prompts collective action for accountability?
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.
Linking outlays to outcomes in Education
Rukmini Banerji
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.
The long road to PAISA 2009
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.
Learning to Complain
Gayatri Sahgal
Honk…. Splash…. Flooding…. Crawl… Blank…..Neon amiss….Frustration…. Underlining despair… Belied...Forgotten. Read more »
Accountability Initiative, 