The missing ‘F’ in decentralization

more here on livemint

In recent years, many doubts have been raised on the merits of decentralization itself – on its ability to deliver better quality of public services, on its willingness to raise resources and on its ability to improve local accountability in general. Critical to meeting these expectations is the level of devolution of functionaries to the control of local governments in our country.

UK aid to India: Part II

Even as there is more hot air gushing out of the UK, The Telegraph (the Indian one) had an interesting piece on possible reasons why the French may have been preferred over the English. The article, by KP Nayar, outlines the following reasons - we dont like pushy sellers who put up political gimmicks and publicise them unnecessarily; and we reward our 'friends in need'. For instance -

...In addition, spread across India’s entire political spectrum that includes much of the Opposition, is a firm conviction that India would not have come out unscathed from the decision to conduct the 1998 nuclear tests if it were not for the steadfast backing that President Jacques Chirac — and Nicolas Sarkozy after him — offered India in an hour of great need.


It is not widely known that during the Kargil war in 1999, the French approved with lightning speed the adaptation of Indian Air Force Mirages in tandem with equally speedy Israeli supplies of laser-guided bombs which they delivered in Srinagar: without such French and Israeli support, India could have lost Kargil to Pervez Musharraf’s perfidy.

No honourable Indian in uniform can forget that in such a situation, the US or Britain would have probably suspended all military supplies to the combatants to prove their bona fides as honest brokers for peace...

Isn't UK a friend in need, given its billions in aid, you may wonder? But that's precisely the point. In spite of its aid commitments, the Government of India has made it clear in the past that Indians won't starve in case the tap is switched off, as evident from the $23 bn of unused aid we are sitting on. Also, there are many good reasons for continuing aid to India.

But this was a much bigger decision for India, as made clear by the Telegraph article, where the stakes easily outweighed considerations of any aid that the UK might be giving India.

Waking up to shit

An international emergency, killing millions every year from among the 2.6 bn people worldwide who dont have access to toilets. The story here in The Guardian, that of Liberia and its sanitation champion, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, none other than the President herself.

She has no doubt how critical sanitation is...

...Half the hospital beds in sub-Saharan Africa are filled with people suffering the consequences of bad sanitation. But, of course, the president sees endless statistics. Only when she looked into why so many Liberian women were dying in childbirth, and why children were dying of something as banal as the squits, did she realise "there is a relationship with water and sanitation. I needed to understand why that was so, and partly it's because people don't have access to clean water. That was an eye-opener for us."

...and is well aware of how un-sexy the subject is -

...In Monrovia, ministers and NGOs hold a weekly crisis meeting about refugees, but not about the 18% of Liberians who die because they have no toilets or clean water.

Towards the end of our interview, I ask the president why that is..."The humanitarian system responds to these things that get sensational," she says. "They want to be seen as responsive. The ordinary village, that no one is taking care of, that doesn't come to mind." And with that she takes her leave, to get back to the job of fixing her country, one latrine at a time.

Indian defence purchase decision a blow to UK aid strategy?

I hope not...but there were a few interesting statements made yesterday over India's decision, in a $10 bn deal, to prefer the French fighter jet Rafale over the Eurofighter, manufactured by BAE, in which the British group BAE has a stake. Excerpts below, from The Hindu -

Prime Minister David Cameron on Wednesday led an attack on India for selecting French firm Dassault Rafale for a mega deal to supply fighter jets ignoring British claims as MPs and the media accused New Delhi of “ingratitude,” arguing that Britain gave millions of pounds in aid to India...

...MPs and right-wing media questioned the wisdom of giving aid to India if it persisted in “snubbing” Britain. India's decision was described as much a failure of British diplomacy as a personal setback to Mr. Cameron in his campaign to establish Britain as a “partner of choice for India.”

In the Commons, his senior Conservative Party colleague and a contender for the party leadership David Davis called for him to pull his full weight to get India to change its mind pointing out that “we give aid to India many times more than what France gives.”

Another Conservative MP Peter Bone said it was a “myth” that “doling out billions of pounds out to countries like this exerts any influence whatsoever on the decisions made by those governments when purchasing equipment.”

“We need to slash the international development money and invest the billions saved to help hard-pressed British families,” he said...

...The right-wing Daily Mail said the contract was lost despite the government claims that the U.K.'s £1billion aid package to India would help secure the order. It recalled that the Secretary of State for International Development Andrew Mitchell justified aid to India last year on grounds that it would facilitate selling Typhoon to India...

This outrage is particularly interesting in the light of this piece of news where UK's Ministry of Defence wants to be an 'intelligent customer' which means among other things, that British manufacturers will need to compete to be supply equipment.

And as always, for the few that might still think otherwise, all aid and trade is political!

On posturing by MFIs

MS Sriram has an article on MFIs, where he insists on the importance on 'modesty' as an important personal and organisational attribute in general, doing business, but especially when working with the poor.

When Mexico's Compartamos, one of the largest MFIs in Latin America, was a not-for-profit, it was not really questioned much on its "sustainability" issue. The moment it became a bank, and particularly after it issued shares in the secondary market, several eyebrows went up. Fundamentally nothing had changed with regard to Compartamos vis-a-vis the clients. In case of Bolivia's BancoSol, the differences between the profit orientation and the social orientation became very sharp, with those with a social orientation moving back to a not-for-profit model leaving the people with commercial orientation to continue the mainstream banking operations.

Does hit home, with microfinance in India. However, we need to see 'modesty' not just in terms of lifestyle, but also in terms what we think we have achieved, especially in development

Helping our MPs learn

There are many reasons why MPs should have more and better quality support staff - MPs are supposed to serve the interests of their constituency by ensuring that the laws that get passed are good for them in particular and for the nation at large. Without adequate support staff who they can rely on for information and advice on laws, policies and upcoming legislations, MPs would have a hard time even understanding proposed legislation, much less proposing their own.

Doug and Suvojit, on livemint

UID: A uniquely nonsensical debate

UID is taking heat from both the right and left these days. On the left, activists claim that the program is overly invasive and restrictive. From the right, critics within the government make nearly the opposite claim – that the program is neither invasive nor restrictive enough. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to question the logic of the UID program, some of which we shall raise below, but many of the criticisms that have achieved prominence in the press recently make little sense. It’s time we put these nonsensical criticisms behind us and have a real debate over the course this important program should take...


More here, on livemint

Another Lant Pritchett master-class

This time, on intepreting results from evaluations and the political economy of policy interventions under test.

The genius of the CCTs in Mexico and in Brazil was not about how to get kids in school but rather about how to use the fact that almost all kids already were in school to generate welfare loss minimizing but nevertheless politically powerful symbolism to expand cash transfers. Many of these transfers were conditioned on the enrollment of children in age groups with near-universal enrollment. (In Brazil in 2001, for example, enrollment at ages 9–12 exceeded 95%.) As a strategy for getting kids into school, as a recent J-PAL note attests, this makes CCTs highly cost-ineffective. Does this make the transfers a silly giveaway or a political master stroke—maximizing the political symbolic value of a cash transfer while minimizing the burden on the recipients of conditions? Ask yourself: What did the designers think?


Miguel Székely, one of the designers of PROGRESA, writes, “The real underlying objective of external donors/investors in some circumstances might not be generating impact, but rather making the statement that they are supporting a particular cause. In such cases, the objective might well be a noble and legitimate one, and the measure of success will be the flow or resources itself, rather than its final impact, but neither the donor/investor nor the executor might have incentives to invest in evaluation.”

In other words, one common narrative—that the scaling up of CCTs is a good example of evidence based policy making because the use of randomization in the design of PROGRESA provided solid evidence that it was an effective program and hence other countries adopted a CCT because of this solid evidence—has it almost exactly backwards. The impact evaluation proved that PROGRESA was cost ineffective if it was considered as a mechanism to increase schooling. Everyone involved in the design knew this. They were not imposing the conditionality to get the behavior conditioned upon, but to get the transfer itself.

For the sake of a level playing field in Uttar Pradesh

But the draping that is to happen today was preceded by much drama on Sunday. When officials from the departments that had built the statues came to mask them as per the poll panel's directives, it realised that it didn't have enough sheets to cover them. In all, nearly 100 statues have to be covered in Lucknow and Noida.

It didn't end there. Soon, realisation dawned upon the authorities that that the Election Commission was yet to send an official order for covering the statues. So the covers came off. But, the Lucknow District Magistrate had said on Sunday evening that they had received the order and it would be implemented from Monday onwards.

This is in reference to the recent Election Commission order to cover all Mayawati's statues and also those of her election symbol, the elephant - which thanks to her extravagant construction spree, are omnipresent in Lucknow and Noida - so that Mayawati and her party dont get any undue advantage in the upcoming state elections.

Sen does a Sainath...

in The Hindu, picking on (rather politely) the Indian media for their obsession with the bold and the beautiful in our society. So multi-crore corporate subsidies don't make for any negative news or critical analysis (unless there is a whiff of corruption), while wage/food guarantee schemes get scrutinised incessantly and often get panned for poor implementation and wastage.

An excerpt -

...The impact of India's division between the privileged and the non-privileged can also be seen in the political power of the advocates of continuing — and expanding — subsidies on fuel use, even those that go particularly to the relatively rich (such as petrol for car owners), or of fertilizers, which yield major transfers of a regressive kind, even as they help with agricultural production. It is possible to redesign these fiscal arrangements to introduce more economic rationality, greater environmental awareness, and the demands of equity with efficiency. The political support for tolerating — and defending — the present profligacy in catering to the relatively better off contrasts sharply with the fiscal alarm bells that are sounded whenever proposals for helping the poor, the hungry, the chronically unemployed come up...

Lant Pritchett on CCTs for education

...“seeing” that teachers should be more accountable for a quality of schooling experience that would retain students however requires seeing what even a child can see, but which the state has no interest in seeing, and hence no capability to see. Holding powerful teachers accountable, while cost-saving and learning increasing, is politically difficult. Even giving poor people a choice in where their children attend school is politically difficult to get by the educationist lobby. But holding poor people accountable is always politically easy...

Lant Pritchett - please read in full

Lant Pritchett explains why CCTs are not the way to go if we really want to improve the quality of education in our schools, and are not just happy getting more bums on the seat. Pritchett explains why education cannot be approached purely from the demand side - and there is plenty of evidence to back this argument - including some plainly obvious data on enrolment and quality of learning among kids in countries like India, Ghana and many others. Clearly, unless teachers can be held accountable (whether hiring contract teachers en-masse is even possible is a different question altogether) in some form, there is not much governments can do to improve education outcomes among children.

Update on 12/1: a response from Berk Ozler, arguing that more school in itself may be a good thing

Minister sacked by Mayawati sobs uncontrollably

Who said politicians don't have a heart!

A talisman for 2012

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;

Where knowledge is free;

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;

Where words come out from the depth of truth;

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;

Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action---

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

Rabindranath Tagore

The real Tarhir Square

Read Mariz Tadros' account of the protests against the army's brutal treatment of women in recent days. Excerpts:

While women took part fully in the uprisings that led to the ousting of Mubarak, this demonstration was different: they were more than participants, they were the leaders. They spoke, and everyone listened. They shouted and everyone- men and women responded back . And it was not just the urban women who were leading, it was the village women in their black gallabiyyas who were raising their voices and everyone answering back even louder. As people marched around and around in Tahrir Square carrying banners against the military, carrying a large picture of the woman who was stripped and dragged from her hair across the square by a soldier, while another soldier was shown about to stomp her bare stomach with his shoe-the determination not to let this rest was strong.

Anyone who equates Jantar Mantar with Tahrir Square has absolutely no idea what they are talking about...

Weekday bloggers



From my Google Reader - The blue bars stand for the 'Items Posted' and the orange bars for 'Items Read'

Bloggers on my reading list like their weekends off...and so do I