Book Review: The Last Mile: Turning Public Policy Upside Down
Author: Amarjeet Sinha
Publisher: Routledge
Pages: 293
Price: Rs 1,295
Widely pre-reviewed
The book comes pre-reviewed by several rural development eminence grise with whom the author collaborated as a government development professional. Unusually, for an IAS officer, he specialized narrowly in the rural development and social sectors, which the author ascribes to his good fortune. More likely, a deep personal commitment, outstanding achievements and productive professional relationships are his secret sauce.
The dream to decentralize persists in a highly centralized polity
The government in India was earlier better known for ideation and conception than implementation. Some of this had to do with the duality of Indian society, in which, till recently, a self-sustaining elite prevailed. Unsurprisingly, government systems aligned more with Delhi-facing centralization than decentralization — offshoots of the initial need to make the nascent, constitutional glue stick. Nevertheless, Gandhiji’s dream of self-governing, resilient villages has enduring appeal. This book provides lessons for improving programme delivery culled from the author’s work experience, of over four decades, translating high level policy objectives into programmatic interventions in multi-dimensional poverty reduction, enhancing equity and gender empowerment.
The Modi government has vastly increased programmatic support for improving welfare outcomes.
Over the last decade, the Union government has dreamt big but also pursued foundational programmes for implementing dreams. These include a mix of public goods — roads, highways, rail and air connectivity, digital infrastructure, health insurance and facilities, financial inclusion, concessional debt, access to electricity and clean (but not green) cooking gas, sanitation, and drinking water supply. Unorthodox programmes provide private goods — such as affordable homes, jobs in publicly funded programmes and income support schemes via the direct transfer mode for 80 million farmer families, free food for poor families and maternal and child health and nutrition support.
Most programs are centrally managed
Union government welfare allocations are increasingly backed by safeguards to ensure the grants are spent well. Along with the fiscal transfers come umbilical cords that bind state governments to the trickle down of Union resource flows. In turn, cities and gram panchayats depend on state governments and are insufficiently empowered to manage themselves. The downside is that this arrangement perpetuates the primacy of centralised management rather than empowering local ecosystems for self-sustaining, contextually aligned, local programs — a bit like foreign donor programs, which are well-meaning, but cater to beneficiary needs only according to the donor’s perception of value for money.
Data and digital connectivity enhance program effectiveness.
The author enumerates the mechanisms adopted in recent times to enhance the efficiency of resource flows and the effectiveness of rural development programs. Broadly, the performance-for-results methodology has been followed by disbursing funds on the achievement of pre-specified program performance metrics. A welcome improvement is the narrower targeting of beneficiaries based on census data of family assets and consumption, regular monitoring of programs, including by independent auditors, to ensure implementation quality.
Improved data management systems allow timely and accurate digital reporting, including through image transfers of geo-tagged project outputs, faster processing of results and generation of monitoring reports. Digital data transfers contribute to the prompt release of funds for downstream payments to suppliers or beneficiaries and enable course correction by identifying problems in performance early on. All this is accompanied by increased legwork for central government program managers — the author visited 600 of India’s 800-odd districts. Unsurprisingly, deeper, near real-time Union government monitoring has led to improved results.
Data driven centralization undercuts local capacity development and diminishes local management
Anything that enhances efficiency, and the effectiveness of public spending is not to be sniffed at. However, decentralization aficionados are right to worry about potential infantilization of the state and local government by a highly efficient, well-resourced central bureaucracy. The second worry is around low institutionalization of planning, program development and management capacity within the state and local governments cadres. Reliance on parallel, program-specific community cadres doing the heavy lifting in oversight undercuts capacity development within government. Though these institutional worries might be substantive, citizens are clearly in no mood to look an efficient gift horse in the mouth.
A proliferation of program specific community cadres infantilizes nascent village governments.
As many as 0.3 million community self-help group coordinators were paid from programme funds, of whom one third are qualified to conduct a social audit, supervise 85 million women self-help group members (up from 28 million in 2014). They “partner” local governments in program monitoring and implementation, thereby enhancing accountability to the community. But governance purists worry about the risk of marginalizing the 3.1 million elected local government members, 42 per cent of whom are women.
The upside of community cadres includes an increase in local employment at a cost lower than government employment. This is balanced by providing more opportunities for the appointees to enhance their work skills, gain job experience, and explore independent business ventures. The author quotes a media report on women bootleggers in Bihar being encouraged to use their business smarts to diversify successfully into legitimate businesses. Another new age growth opportunity is local verification of carbon sequestration in new plantations or emissions reduction in biofuel projects registered for trading of such savings on carbon exchanges.
The 24 self-contained chapters are well-suited for the dip-and-sip reader looking to become familiar with the work and well-being of women, skilling, health and nutrition, basic and higher education. Short-flight readers should try chapters 1, 16, 23 and 24 to get straight to the arguments and associated evidence and an insight into the author’s delightfully determined social commitment, while keeping the book handy for subsequent dives into its insightful musings.
This Book Review was first published in Business Standard on March 28 2024.
Opinion India 