Author: cprindia

The series is titled ‘Plugging in: Electricity consumption in Indian Homes’.

Energy-demand interventions are important for shaping consumption patterns as India’s energy and technology infrastructure transitions. At the same time, implementation of demand-side solutions is not always straightforward because of the variety of influences on consumption decisions. In the final piece of this series, we initiate a discussion about the drivers of residential electricity consumption.

What conditions electricity use in homes? In particular, are there factors outside of the technological and physical aspects of the house structure and appliances that can have an impact on a household’s electricity consumption? We examine this question in low-income households in Rajkot, Gujarat. The sample provides a suitable context in which to undertake this study, because it contains identical home units, each with the same floor area and layout. This architecture allows us to control for the physical effects of the building, the floor area and the surrounding climate across the sample. The work is part of our ongoing study on energy use in low-income urban households under the CapaCITIES project.

Conventional understanding suggests electricity consumption is a function of building, technological and climate characteristics. Alongside, appliance ownership within a household is a key driver of how much electricity is used. Homes which own only lights and fans will have a different consumption pattern to homes that also own a refrigerator and television – as will be reflected in a different electricity bill between the two. Thereby, in order to control for the effect of appliance ownership on electricity use, we develop an appliances-asset index that ranks each household according to the appliances they own. That is, households with the same rank on the index own the same appliance, in the same quantity. In affordable housing units, the index can also serve as a proxy for economic class, as wealthier households tend to have more and more expensive appliances. Having now controlled for the major building, technological and climate drivers of residential electricity use, we compare the metered electricity consumption (from the utility) of homes that have the same rank on the asset index, to test how similar or different their consumption will be (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Variation in electricity bills for households as per their score on the appliances-asset index
Source: Residential electricity use in affordable homes (Khosla et al. in preparation)

Figure 1 provides interesting initial results. It shows a dramatic difference in the electricity bills of homes, even when they own the same appliances (displayed by the same rank on the appliances-asset index between -1.5 and 1.5). Further, when categorised according to the number of people within a home to account for differences that may arise from differing number of household members (either less than or more than three per home in the Figure), the large variation in the bill remains.

What explains this difference in the electricity bill of homes that own the same appliances, have similar number of people, the same floor area, are in buildings with similar physical characteristics, and under the same weather conditions?

The literature on household energy use offers a number of different factors that influence electricity consumption. Many of these are related to physical building characteristics, for instance, building age, materials, number of windows, etc. In addition, climate conditions are important drivers of how much electricity households consume to be thermally comfortable. And within the household, the area of the home, the number of people that inhabit it and the appliances owned are important determinants of how much electricity is consumed. Figure 1 is striking because in spite of controlling for all these aspects, the electricity bills of the homes are significantly different. This points to an important finding that human behaviour, or how people actually operate and use appliances, after they are purchased, is a key factor in driving electricity use. A better understanding of such human dimensions of energy consumption is particularly needed in the Indian context, where research on the role of behaviour and lifestyles in influencing household energy use is limited.

In addition to energy use behaviour, Figure 1’s electricity bill variation could also be a function of the age and efficiency of the appliances, which can be different even for the same appliance type, along with differences in the orientation of the buildings of the different households. Uncovering these details and developing an interdisciplinary understanding of the techno-economics of electricity consumption, with the social and cultural roots of behaviour patterns, is needed to better predict the interactions between people, buildings and technologies. This will enable better management of household electricity use, especially as the urban population grows and income levels rise. More so, such insights are necessary for informed future consumption projections and policy choices, to step away from traditional economic models that assume humans make rational, utility-maximising, everyday decisions and that appliance usage hours are uniform across individuals, an assumption that many studies make. Ultimately, understanding how individuals, households, and more broadly, societies, use or convert electricity has much to bear on the effectiveness of demand-side measures.

At the conclusion of this residential electricity series, we hope its different themes have provided new insight into the challenges and opportunities of electricity use in Indian homes. These have included trends and disparities in access and consumption across states; the impact of the country’s large LED lighting programme, including in affordable homes; the effectiveness of appliance standards and labels; the energy services demanded within affordable housing and more broadly, across the National Capital Region; metering appliance use patterns; and the role of energy use behaviour in influencing consumption. These findings drew from recently published work, and from new research that will be published shortly, all aimed at emphasising demand-side solutions for energy and climate change, within the context of development.

This piece is authored by Radhika Khosla at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi. 

We would be grateful for your feedback on this series and request you to answer this 2 minute anonymous survey.

This blog series is also available on the Prayas website here.

We will soon be compiling all the posts of this series into a document for future reference.

Other posts in this series:

• Electricity Consumption in Indian Homes
• Trends in India’s Residential Electricity Consumption
• India’s LED Lighting Story
• Illuminating Affordable Homes
• The Efficiency of Appliances
• Appliances used in Affordable Housing
• Electrifying the National Capital Region
• Exploring the different uses of household appliances

As part of our initiative to engage with law and policy makers, the Technology and Society Initiative at CPR launched a new series on ‘Navigating Interactions between Technology and Policy’. The focus audience for this initiative are Legislative Assistants to Members of Parliament (LAMP) fellows, parliamentary aides and others directly involved with law and policy making in India. This three-part series of workshops, consisting of talks and presentations by experts from and outside CPR, followed by lively interactions, aims to shed light on current debates pertaining to technology.

The first workshop in this series, with its focus on informational privacy in the digital age, was conducted at the CPR Conference Room on 22nd August. The discussion had three segments and was led by key resource persons in the form of individual presentations, followed by an open round of questions and answers. The open round was moderated by Ananth Padmanabhan, Visiting Fellow at CPR.

This workshop shed insights on several critical aspects of ‘informational privacy’ – The meaning of such privacy within the context of digital technologies, deficiencies in the current legal and policy framework to optimally safeguard the same, proposed regulatory framework to address the current gap in the form of the Personal Data Protection Bill, its significance and potential impact, and the need to constantly engage with this theme in the light of emerging technologies like automated facial recognition.

The first resource person, Lalit Panda, Research Fellow at Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, discussed the fundamentals of privacy, focusing on the need for sui generis protection and the concepts and tools required to offer such protection. Privacy entails control over personal information, which then secures the freedom of thought and political association, the freedom to make self-defining life choices, and from surveillance. The debate on secrecy versus privacy needs to be seen in the light of justificatory principles and values which are rooted in social norms and political structures, and which broadly impact economic development as well. These principles and values have found new meaning in the digital era as a consequence of all-pervasive technologies expanding exponentially alongside conditions of weak regulatory capacity. The possession of data by third parties and the concepts of permanence and traceability of information on individuals complicates matters further. Panda therefore emphasised the need for special data protection rules.

Nehaa Chaudhari, public policy lead at Ikigai Law, built on this insight and detailed the regulatory structures and compliance and enforcement regime envisaged under the draft Personal Data Protection Bill, 2018. The bill has been centred around the concepts of personal and sensitive personal data, the obligations on data fiduciaries who make determinative choices on how such personal data may be processed, and the rights of citizens whose data is being collected, processed and monetised. In the draft bill, both data fiduciaries and data processors have obligations, but the latter are saddled with a lesser number of such obligations. The bill fundamentally reiterates well-accepted data processing principles including purpose limitation, collection limitation, lawful processing, notice and consent, data accountability, quality and storage limitations. It is imperative that fiduciaries must adopt ‘privacy by design’ in their business operations and ensure that privacy is protected at all points of processing. By design, the systems should be able to anticipate, identify and prevent harms to data principals. Chaudhari discussed the role of two key players, the Data Protection Authority of India (DPAI) and the Central Government, in shaping regulations and enforcement norms under the bill. The DPAI is in charge of enforcement but the Central Government has a crucial role in tasking this independent regulator. The DPAI is designed as a highly centralised regulatory institution, with wide-ranging authority including the power to issue directions and codes of practice addressed to the data fiduciaries/processors, request information from them, conduct inquiries, appoint investigators, and decide on the merits of a case and pass final orders. The DPAI also has the task of increasing the public awareness on data protection. With these multiple and diverse functions vested in it, DPAI runs the risk of becoming an overburdened regulatory body with limited resources and capacity.

Responding to the complex question of interaction between emerging technologies and privacy, Smriti Parsheera, Fellow at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, deep-dived into facial recognition technologies (FRTs) to present her insights. FRTs are essentially algorithms used to run captured video feed against pre-existing databases of facial images and then identify matches between the two. FRTs are prone to high error rates as disclosed by compelling research studies. Even where they work, it is usually for verifications done with the cooperation or consent of individuals, such as in airports, classrooms, or for biometric attendance systems at workplaces. Importance of discussing this technology emerges from the availability of a large database of pictures uploaded from social media accounts or collected through CCTVs, and the computational advances in processing these large data sets. Alongside FRTs, drones and self-driving cars which use similar software could potentially interfere with individual and collective privacy. In India, FRTs were earlier proposed to be used as part of Aadhaar identification / authentication, though this project finds little mention now. Additionally, the National Crime Records Bureau has issued a tender for an Automated Facial Recognition System, and airports have initiated DigitYatri for seamless and hassle-free check-in. While the technology debate is swinging between ‘convenience and efficiency’ on one side, and ‘human errors and privacy concerns’ on the other, national security remains to be the most dominant rationale offered by public authorities in support of this technology. In this scenario, one needs to ask and answer the following questions: Is this technology reliable enough given instances of false identification of women and people of colour? Can it be considered legally tenable, considering that data is being collected and processed ubiquitously for an altogether different purpose without the consent of individuals? Would it end up being a tool that supports discrimination, considering the reliance on this technology on biased input feeds? Parsheera stressed the need for applying the Puttaswamy standards to a rights-based assessment of this technology, and the additional need for self-regulatory and ethical frameworks that work alongside statutory protection

By Philippe Cullet

India is facing an increasingly dire water situation. The NITI Aayog in 2018 warned that the country is facing the ‘worst water crisis in its history’.¹This is a crisis of availability of water with various states facing increasingly frequent and/or acute water scarcity for at least some part of the year. With increasing water use and more erratic monsoons, per capita water availability in the country is progressively decreasing. An associated challenge is the country’s dependence on groundwater. This is particularly significant because the overwhelming majority of the population depends on groundwater for its domestic water needs; for crores of people water is a source of constant worry in a context where water tables are rapidly falling and water quality rapidly diminishing. It is also a concern for irrigators since the bulk of irrigation today depends on groundwater. Juxtaposed against this water scarcity challenge is a crisis of abundance reflected in the frequent floods that afflict several states on a regular basis.

However, the most critical challenge of all is that of governance of water. On the one hand, the governance of water is organized largely around laws and institutions tasked with allocating and regulating use of water among various claimants. On the other hand, water protection is seen as an environmental mandate that remains largely distinct from water governance, even though water is an integral part of environmental governance. This makes for poor outcomes since protecting water is necessary to ensure availability today and in the future and thus conditions water use. The failure to effectively protect water is an increasingly significant cause of conflicts among different water users.

The challenge of water governance primarily emerges from an inappropriate and insufficient legal framework. This challenge can be broken into different components.

• The rules governing access to water are often drawn from old case laws that gave primary control over water to landowners.² This is problematic because there is no mechanism to coordinate the cumulative use of a river by all riparian landowners, leading to potential over-exploitation. It is also inappropriate because it gives only landowners rights over a resource that every person needs to use on a daily basis for drinking, food and domestic needs. In addition, it precludes any basin-wide or aquifer-wide protection measures since control over water is organized around the claims of individual landowners. This is particularly problematic for groundwater where each individual landowner has the right to take as much groundwater as they please, to the extent of depriving other users of the same aquifer and without considering the need to avoid use beyond replenishment.
• One of the specific problems with the above scheme is that the rules for surface water and groundwater are not the same. It was determined in the nineteenth century when the connections between the two were not well understood. This has led to the very unfortunate situation where rules for surface water and groundwater are different. Moreover, most water laws centre around issues related to surface water, leaving groundwater unregulated, even though this is the critical issue today. The largest use of water, irrigation, is mostly governed by laws that consider irrigation to be sourced from surface water when in reality farmers rely overwhelmingly on groundwater for irrigation.
• The responsibility for governing water is divided between different institutions, from panchayats/municipalities to states and the Union. The Constitution gives primary responsibility to states, while the local dimensions of water governance have been confirmed in the 72nd and 73rd constitutional amendments and the Union has some powers concerning matters that go beyond the state level. The recognition that water needs to be addressed at all levels is an excellent starting point. In practice, however, even though the Supreme Court has repeatedly stated that the state at each level is a ‘public trustee’,³ this is not yet reflected in legislation, leading to unnecessary governance conflicts.
• The rules in place for drinking water supply are separate for urban and rural areas, with different supply norms for rural and urban residents.⁴ This fragmented governance is problematic since urban areas increasingly rely on water from beyond the municipal limits, thus making it imperative to address problems arising jointly.
• As we have seen, the rules treat surface water and groundwater separately. They also view pollution as an environmental matter and usage as a water sector matter.

As this brief description highlights, there are vast gaps between regulation and practice, as well gaps between the existing parts of the regulatory framework. These issues have been critical concerns in the water sector and policymakers at different levels have tried to address them. This has led to various law-making initiatives at the state and central levels. In keeping with the constitutional mandate, states have adopted a number of water laws over the past couple of decades. This is commendable since it reflects a recognition that a number of issues can only be effectively addressed if legislation is adopted. At the same time, states have generally not engaged independently in developing new water laws and have tended to react to policy priorities set elsewhere. The resultant patchwork of laws does not necessarily address the most critical issues.

The new government needs to focus, in particular, on two initiatives: a framework water legislation and a model groundwater law. Both of these have been in the making since the beginning of the decade, having been proposed and developed by the last two governments at the Centre. They need a much stronger push to ensure a strong legal framework for water that allows India to face the challenges of the 2020s.

Towards Framework Water Legislation

The medley of water laws that exist in most states is deficient in that these laws are not centred around any set of principles governing the water sector as a whole. Principles have been laid down by the higher judiciary over time but they have not been enshrined in legislation. This is a gap that impedes effective governance of water and prevents water conflicts from being resolved on bases that are clear for all users.

In the absence of framework legislation in any state, the Planning Commission of India took the initiative of drafting such a law in 2011.⁵ The underlying idea was to ensure that all institutions concerned with water could rely on a single frame of reference so that water governance becomes more transparent and accessible. The drafting of framework legislation was taken up again by the Ministry of Water Resources, River Development & Ganga Rejuvenation (MoWRRDGR) in 2015, leading to an updated draft known as the National Water Framework Bill, 2016.⁶

There is a strong need to ensure that all water and all water uses are governed by the same principles, and that protection and use principles are clearly linked. The new government must ensure that this draft is taken up and adopted so that the country is better prepared to face the increasing number of water crises that are likely to beset a number of states in the 2020s.

Need for Comprehensive Groundwater Legislation

Groundwater is and will remain the primary source of water for most water uses for many years. Existing groundwater regulation is extremely dated; the principles were laid out in the 19th century and have not been updated. Recent regulatory interventions focus on top-down attempts to control usage; they are failing because they neither consider the broader aquifer-level protection nor reflect the fact that groundwater use is, first, a local issue to be addressed at the local level. The rapidly deepening groundwater crisis calls for an entirely new perspective on groundwater protection and groundwater rights.

The central government has played an important role in providing models that states can use to develop their own legislations. A first generation of model legislation promoted between 1970 and 2005 focused essentially on introducing new control measures for groundwater use without addressing either the rights to groundwater or the need to protect, manage and regulate groundwater at aquifer level. In 2011, the Planning Commission of India took up the challenge of drafting a comprehensive groundwater model law addressing protection and use from the local level to the state level.⁷ In 2015, the MoWRRDGR decided to go back to the draft of the Planning Commission and requested an updated version. This was delivered in 2016, and submitted for comments to states and the NITI Aayog; a revised version incorporating comments was submitted in 2017.

The new government should ensure that the Model Groundwater (Sustainable Management) Bill, 2017, is taken forward at the earliest.⁸ Where it exists, state groundwater legislation based on the old model legislation is woefully incapable of addressing today’s challenges; in any case most of these Acts exist mostly on paper. The Bill is an appropriate template that the central government must formally adopt and promote to address the rapidly worsening situation in terms of falling water tables and diminishing water quality besetting vast areas of the country.

Priorities for the New Legislature

The water sector has been the object of much attention from policymakers for several decades. Most regulatory interventions have, however, been largely piecemeal as reflected in the fact that most water laws are sectoral (for instance, irrigation-specific) and fail to address the unavoidable connections amongst different uses and between surface water and groundwater. Some of the most glaring gaps, such as a missing framework of principles governing the water sector, have been partly filled by the Supreme Court and the high courts. This is an appropriate start but does not affect the governance of water on a daily basis at the local level, which is determined by the laws in place. Further, the lack of comprehensive legislation to address groundwater leads to a situation where the most important aspect is not regulated by comprehensive regulation, contributing to the increasingly dire situation in many states.

The new government should immediately make use of the two existing drafts prepared in the previous legislature and take them forward:

• The adoption of the model law for groundwater – the Model Groundwater (Sustainable Management) Bill, 2017 – is crucial to ensure the equitable and sustainable use and protection of groundwater.
• The adoption of a framework legislation based on the National Water Framework Bill, 2016, will ensure that there is a set of overall principles for the entire water sector reflecting legal developments in recent decades. This will ensure that all actors in the sector have the same point of reference in their interventions.

Other pieces as part of CPR’s policy document, ‘Policy Challenges – 2019-2024’ can be accessed below:

• The Future is Federal: Why Indian Foreign Policy Needs to Leverage its Border States by Nimmi Kurian
• Rethinking India’s Approach to International and Domestic Climate Policy by Navroz K Dubash and Lavanya Rajamani
• India’s Foreign Policy in an Uncertain World by Shyam Saran
• Need for a Comprehensive National Security Strategy by Shyam Saran
• A Clarion Call for Just Jobs: Addressing the Nation’s Employment Crisis by Sabina Dewan
• Time for Disruptive Foreign and National Security Policies by Bharat Karnad
• Multiply Urban ‘Growth Engines’, Encourage Migration to Reboot Economy by Mukta Naik
• Schooling is not Learning by Yamini Aiyar
• Clearing Our Air of Pollution: A Road Map for the Next Five Years by Santosh Harish, Shibani Ghosh and Navroz K Dubash
• Interstate River Water Governance: Shift focus from conflict resolution to enabling cooperation by Srinivas Chokkakula

Air pollution exposures in India constitute a major public health threat. To prevent a full-blown national health crisis, our policy conversations and actions need to first acknowledge, and then respond to, the enormity and severity of the problem. A significant part of the Indian population is exposed to air quality that is considerably worse than nationally and internationally accepted guidelines. What is the nature of this health crisis, how much do we know, and is there enough evidence to act? We need to engage with these questions as we demand action against air pollution. Impact of air pollution on health in India are severe and prevalent across all states and socio-demographic groups. These impacts, whether estimated through mortality or morbidity rates, or through measuring reduction in life expectancy – are all growing at a significant rate. As a risk factor for disease burden in the country, air pollution is second only to child and maternal malnutrition, and ranks higher than unsafe water and unsanitary conditions – conditions we have long associated with poor health in India. As the previous article in this series showed, the annual mean ambient levels of PM2.5 are multiple times both Indian and WHO norms. Health-damaging air pollution exposures are an everyday reality for both urban and rural populations in India. And it is not only ambient air pollution. Household air pollution – primarily caused by burning solid fuels such as wood and dung for cooking, has significant health impacts as well, and 56% of India’s population, largely in the rural areas, continues to rely on solid fuels, with the highest numbers in the states of Bihar, Jharkhand and Odisha. The most recent India State-Level Disease Burden estimates, released by an initiative co-ordinated by the Indian Council for Medical Research and the Public Health Foundation of India, and published in The Lancet Planetary Health, show that ambient and household air pollution contributes nearly equally to health impacts.

In 2017, air pollution is estimated to have contributed to one in eight deaths in India for a total of 1.24 million deaths according to estimates published in the Lancet study mentioned above. The impact goes beyond mortality; air pollution significantly reduces quality of life by increasing the incidence of a range of illnesses. Health literature uses a metric called Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALYs), which includes both the years of life lost due to premature death and the number of years lived with less than ideal health. The Lancet study found that air pollution contributed to more than 38 million years of healthy life lost in India.

The impact of air pollution on newborn babies and infants under the age of five years is particularly alarming. According to a recent WHO report, in 2016, 100,000 children under the age of five die annually due to exposure to air pollution – the highest in the world in this age bracket. This number is particularly astonishing, when compared to the overall under 5 years mortality in India in 2016 which stands at just under 10 lakh. Therefore, 10% of Indian children under 5 years are dying due to air pollution, a problem against which we continue to move at a glacial pace.

Air pollution is also emerging as the single largest risk factor for non-communicable diseases. This is especially the case for women. Air pollution is the single largest risk factor for women for chronic respiratory diseases, while for men, smoking and other occupational risks are also important contributory factors. A similar profile is emerging for cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

We are still discovering the scale and range of damage air pollution causes on our health. Cardio-respiratory diseases and lung cancer in adults, and acute lower respiratory infections in children are the more commonly known impacts of air pollution. However, emerging epidemiological research indicate a much wider range of health impacts of air pollution such as on birthweight, child growth and cognitive abilities, obesity and bladder cancer. For instance, recent studies in Tamil Nadu have provided convincing evidence for impacts of ambient and household PM2.5 exposures on birthweight. These impacts are not currently included in the burden of disease estimates, and therefore the totality of impacts of air pollution in India is likely grossly underestimated.

While there are not many epidemiological studies on long-term mortality in low and middle income countries including India, there is evidence that adverse effects of exposure to air pollution seen in other parts of the world are also occurring in India. While further studies are critical for our understanding, we need not wait for these to act, particularly since pollution levels in India are higher than anywhere else. Changes in daily rates of mortality associated with short-term exposure to particulates in India are similar to those reported in multicity studies conducted in China, South Korea, Japan, Europe, and North America. Several Indian studies have contributed to the pool of studies included in meta-analyses for estimating relative risks of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Diseases and cataracts in relation to household air pollution exposure. Arguments about lack of India-specific studies of air pollution on health do not hold water.

The evidence we have now sends a loud and clear message – there is a health crisis unfolding in India. Commissioning additional studies on emissions and impacts will undoubtedly help guide future policy actions. But currently available information and knowledge on health effects and exposure attribution to sources is more than sufficient to move us into ‘mission’ mode. Reasons not to make this move, whether political, financial, legal, or technical, while perhaps compelling, pale in comparison to the following reality: we are consciously subjecting the current and future generations to conditions that increase the burden of non-communicable diseases, impact child mortality, reduce life expectancy, impair cognitive skills, adversely impact pregnant women and their unborn children, and create life-long medical dependencies. We can no longer afford a lackadaisical response to a risk factor that is eroding rural and urban health, across every state in India.

Kalpana Balakrishnan is Director, ICMR Center for Advanced Research on Air Quality, Climate and Health, Sri Ramachandra Institute for Higher Education and Research (SRIHER), Chennai. Shibani Ghosh is a Fellow, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.

This article is the second in a four-part series on India’s air pollution. The original article, which was published in the Hindustan Times on December 20, 2018, can be found here. For more information on CPR’s work on air pollution, visit the Clearing the Air? project page. 

In this Series:

Understanding the Curse of Air Pollution (1/4)

Public health in India a casualty of air pollution (2/4)

Delhi Has a Complex Air Pollution Problem (3/4)

Air pollution: India’s waking up, but there’s a long way to go (4/4)

PAISA STUDIES – AN INTRODUCTION

‘The flow of funds through various levels of the government is very similar to the flow of blood from the heart to the various parts of the body. If there is blockage somewhere, it affects the entire body, so in that regard PAISA studies do the work of a physician’, said a senior official in the Elementary Education Department of Purnia district in Bihar.

PAISA (Planning, Allocations and Expenditures, Institutions Studies in Accountability) is Accountability Initiative’s (AI) flagship research programme. The research focuses on making government processes: planning, decision-making and fund flow in key social sector schemes transparent. Under the PAISA programme, AI runs the country’s largest citizen-led expenditure tracking survey. These PAISA surveys are aimed at identifying implementation bottlenecks and through this understanding the factors that contribute to weak implementation and broken accountability systems on the ground.

In December, 2015, AI conducted a PAISA survey focusing on three centrally sponsored schemes (CSS) – Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA), Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) and Swach Bharat Mission (SBM). The survey, conducted in 10 districts across five states (Bihar, Himachal Pradesh, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan) in India, was undertaken against the backdrop of significant changes in fund flows to states, with the central government enhancing tax devolution (untied money) to state governments.

Similar to PAISA surveys in the past, the 2015 survey too revealed the extent to which structural problems with the public finance management system, such as lack of transparency in fund releases, can impact the quality of programme implementation on the ground. However, the lack of predictability was exacerbated as a result of the changes in fiscal transfers. For instance, in 2015-16, 31% schools had not received their annual school grants, as compared to 5% in the previous year.

Additionally, the PAISA survey collected information on progress in implementation, including achievement of Right to Education related school outputs, teacher and student attendance, availability of toilets, implementation of sanitation related awareness programmes, and the prevalence of open defecation.

The survey results were disseminated at the policy level through the budget brief reports, AI’s annual flagship research output. At the district level, AI adopted a new approach to dissemination. Rather than circulate reports, an attempt was made to share research findings through a dialogue with district and block level implementing officials. The objective was to leverage the research findings to catalyse a ground-level discussion on how to improve implementation and accountability – where it actually matters.

With this objective, between May, 2016 and December, 2016, a total of 40 PAISA dialogues were conducted across the 10 PAISA survey districts with sector specific implementation officials. The dialogues were conducted by AI field researchers or PAISA Associates (PA). This note captures the process of these dialogues and their impact.

A land less and building less elementary government school at full attendance despite the lack of basic resources, in Purnia, Bihar

PAISA DIALOGUES – A PLATFORM FOR FINDING SOLUTIONSThe key feature that distinguished the PAISA dialogues from the dissemination exercises of the past was that it was a ‘dialogue’ – focused on identifying solutions rather than a presentation of research findings. ‘Whenever we conduct a dialogue to share our research, the tone and intent is not to point fingers. Rather we emphasise  how this is ‘our’ problem rather than ‘yours’, and talk about how we can engage in a meaningful ‘discussion to find solutions for these problems,’ said Tajuddin, Accountability Initiative’s PAISA Associate in Jhunjhunu district of Rajasthan. The feeling was mutual. ‘We got a good understanding of reality through AI’s research findings. Going forward, we would like to be engaged on a deeper level to make this process even more fruitful,’ expressed the SBM Coordinator in Jaipur. Another benefit of this approach was that it developed organically. From the point of establishing relationships with government representatives to conducting research, sharing it, and then working together over a period of time to try and identify solutions – there was a genuine feeling of partnership all through. The answers were not always obvious or simple, but the entire process was oriented towards finding sustainable solutions through building strong trustful relationships.

For instance, during a PAISA Dialogue, AI’s research was presented to a high-level district official in Kangra district. ‘Through the dialogue we shared that despite there being a School Management Committee (SMC) in 100% of the schools sampled, the SMC members were involved in the making of the School Development Plan (SDP) in only 73% of the schools. School Development Plan is supposed to be created solely by the SMCs and is factored into the district’s plans for annual fund allocations. The district officials took a lot of interest in this and asked us to contribute to the master trainers’ training for all SMCs in the district. We were even asked to monitor the trainings delivered at the cluster level. We began work with five SMCs and trained them on their responsibilities as members of this committee, fiscal literacy and the mechanisms around fund flows,’ explained Indresh, a PA in Himachal Pradesh.

The Rajasthan team had a similar experience. ‘For instance, SMCs previously planned the SDP around funds received through the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan only, which are fully tied. However, schools can also receive money from Panchayats, the community, the MLA Lad funds etc., and since not all of these are tied funds, it gives the SMC greater freedom to develop a plan and budget for the coming year accordingly. Our training informed them about these various sources of funds, and helped them better assess, prioritise and address their needs. These mechanisms exist to provide citizens a voice in their well-being and that of their children, therefore, creating awareness around them leads to better implementation of these government schemes,’ added Tajuddin from Rajasthan.

Not only do government representatives place trust in AI’s research findings and work together to find solutions, many agreed that the research mirrored their reality. ‘We know a lot of these things from before but there is a level of denial within the system,’ said a District Accounts Officer from Himachal Pradesh.

Finding Solutions with Education Administrators in Solan, Himachal Pradesh

Further, an ICDS official from Satara added, ‘The AI presentation educated us about how funds flow from the top to the bottom. We did not receive any such training from the government. This is especially helpful to know because, a lot of times, despite irregular and uncoordinated payments to Anganwadi workers (AWW), the government expects us to run programmes without providing the funds – the money for that comes out of the pockets of AWWs a lot of times.’In the course of the dialogues, many officials pointed out the important role that these discussions played in validating and highlighting everyday implementation bottlenecks that they faced. This external validation of their struggles, at times, motivated officials to push harder toward identifying solutions. Such as in the example below:

Frontline officials from the education, health and nutrition departments in Himachal Pradesh, along with local PAISA associates, presented findings of the PAISA surveys to the District Magistrate (DM) of the Himachal Pradesh survey district, which resulted in the following actions:

• Since programmes under the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) scheme were stalled due to the lack of Anganwadi buildings for maternal and child support services, the DM ordered the completion of the buildings by June, 2016. He also asked for temporary relocation of the centres to elementary school buildings.
• There was a renewed focus on acquiring necessary equipment for height and weight measurement for monitoring and sustaining the healthy growth of women and children availing the ICDS scheme, which was earlier being neglected.

In yet another example, the PAISA survey highlighted the gaps between fund receipts and actual expenditure in schools. In the subsequent PAISA dialogues conducted, it was established that the reason for this lag was because school headmasters (who manage the school bank accounts) were not given any information on the date and time of the actual funds transfer to schools. This information was usually obtained informally during routine bank visits. ‘When AI shared this with us, we started the system of sending text messages to the phones of headmasters, informing them of the transfer. This has helped us create a more open communication system and reduced the lags to an extent,’ explained an SSA official in Jhalwar district, Rajasthan.

Although change is possible, the truth is that the deep centralisation of the Indian bureaucracy leaves relatively little room for maneuve at the frontline. Consequently, the frontline bureaucracy has also drawn on the dialogues as the fora to express their grievances.  ‘It is often difficult for us to find a channel through which we can address our grievances. Through these interactions and sharing its research at higher levels of government, we feel AI can be our voice and a link between us and higher levels of government,’ expressed an ICDS official in Madhya Pradesh.

To that end, dialogues have been initiated and are in progress with officials at the highest levels in both districts and states, with a view to informing policy interventions, where necessary. For instance, in Rajasthan, the AI field staff presented findings from their study on the ICDS scheme to the state Director of ICDS, the Deputy Director and the Financial Advisor. They shared information on blockages of fund flows in different districts, which led to the Director and Finance Advisor ordering a deeper investigation into the matter, and finding ways to ensure effective transfers. In the words of the District Magistrate in Himachal Pradesh, ‘AI’s research has been very helpful. With bigger sample sizes, it can definitely be used for policy intervention to find concrete solutions.’

PAISA Dialogue on ICDS in Jhunjhunu, Rajasthan

PAISA Dialogue on SSA in Purnia, Bihar

WHY DOES THE BOTTOM-UP APPROACH WORK?In most interactions between the civil society, researchers and the government, there is one crucial level – the frontline bureaucracy – which is ignored. Since these are the people responsible for the actual service delivery, we thought it was very important to reach out to them and find ways to make our research useful for them,’ said Yamini Aiyar, Director of Accountability Initiative, when asked about the strategic reason behind involving lower levels of bureaucracy in an ongoing dialogue, versus the typical approach of disseminating to high-level government officials. This bottom-up approach has also greatly informed AI’s own learning. It is evident from field interactions that those responsible for drafting policies at the state level or above are often far removed from the actual ground realities. Consequently, AI staff have begun to view their role in the social policy and governance accountability ecosystem differently.

‘Instead of forcing our views we are engaging in a debate from the lowest level and intend to go to the very top. This is a very productive process and I am sure will bring about the change that AI is trying to create within our government systems and schemes,’ said Ram Ratan Jat, a PA from Jaipur.

‘When you go to the bottom first then you get additional qualitative information, the ground reality, which is helpful to tie in and present along with your research. This is the sort of information which people at the state level often do not have themselves, and when we present it to them, then we, in a way, become the link between two levels of government machinery,’ explained Dinesh Kumar, a senior PA who interacts closely with state level officials in Bihar. ‘For instance, when we do the PAISA dialogue, we first talk to the teacher, cluster and block officer and only then go to the district magistrate or state project director. By doing so, we take suggestions from all of these people to the higher levels of government. That along with our research has a great impact,’ he added.

‘We really appreciate AI’s team interacting with us on such a regular basis. Through, their research and these interactions we have learnt a lot about the ways in which funds flow through the government and have been able to identify a lot of our problems and ways in which to tackle them, even if that means knowing which questions to ask. Not a lot of organisations spend time with us in such a dedicated manner,’ Supervisor at an Anganwadi Centre in Satara, MaharashtraMid-day meal in progress at an Anganwadi Centre in Satara, Maharashtra.

FROM RESEARCHERS TO AGENTS OF CHANGEBy adopting this bottom up approach towards relationship building within different levels of the government, AI made a strategic decision to make a transition from being a typical research organisation to one that uses its research to be an agent of change. This strategic move also made AI question its own structures and processes. ‘If we are trying to empower the frontline of the government machinery through our research to create meaningful change, then should we not be empowering the associates within our team who are working at the field level, are aware of the cultural sensitivities, and are often more in tune with the ground realities to facilitate this change?,’ explained Yamini Aiyar. To this end, AI has invested intensively in the development and growth of its PAs, empowering them to embody the meaning of being an ‘agent of change’. ‘AI has always felt like a home. From the very beginning, they have paid attention to our skill development – from training us on government structures and fund flows, research methodologies,   the softer skills pertaining to building and maintaining relationships, and now teaching us to create and tell stories from the research we help conduct. We are a part of this process from the beginning to the end. It is a lot of responsibility but it is also very empowering,’ said Poonam, a senior PA in the Rajasthan state team. Poonam started out at AI in 2009 very close to its inception. Beginning with district and block level engagements, Poonam is now also involved with state level engagements and in mentoring younger PAs in the state team.

Swapna, a senior PA in Madhya Pradesh, reflects similar sentiments. ‘When I started working at AI, I felt hesitant even going up to a district official, let alone discussing matters related to accountability and governance,’ she said. However, recently Swapna presented AI’s research findings at a meeting of the highest ranking district officials convened by the District Magistrate. There was no hesitation and she felt completely at ease discussing complex themes relating to accountability and governance with those responsible for ensuring it. They sat there in silence and paid attention to everything she had to say. ‘I feel I am now confident and aware enough to conduct these disseminations at the state level as well,’ she added with a smile.

Tajuddin explained how working with AI honed his communication skills greatly, ‘The biggest learning for me has been to know how to translate data into a story and more importantly how to mould it in different ways for different stakeholders. For instance, power-point presentations and charts with percentages are great at the district level, but if we are presenting to a member of a SMC who is illiterate, we need to get creative in terms of our presentation. So we presented our findings on posters through pictures. The training given at AI and our comfort with the material we are presenting has given us the confidence and comfort of customising our presentation style.’

And finally Ram Ratan Jat summed up what drives all the Associates who are deeply committed to AI, ‘I really relate to AI’s mission, vision and objectives. It is one of those rare organisations which constantly gives you opportunities to grow, if you are willing to. I have spent more than six years of my life here and I have not felt that the learning stopped at any point during this long period of time.’

The Accountability Initiative Team with the PAISA Associates

Data collected by Naman Govil.

What is the quality of public healthcare available across rural and urban India? What are the barriers and the potential solutions? Based on extensive field work in Delhi, Madhya Pradesh (rural), West Bengal (rural), Mumbai and Patna, and drawing on 15 years of research, Dr Jishnu Das, a Senior Visiting Fellow at CPR and lead economist in the Development Research Group at The World Bank shares his insights. These can be accessed through:

• A podcast (above), which explores the issues with the quality of healthcare available to the rural poor, and;
• An audio recording, where Dr Das presents findings from both rural and urban areas, with a view to opening up a broader policy discussion of federal and state responsibilities towards health in India. This audio recording can be accessed here.

Two of the four research papers Dr Das drew on can be accessed at the following links:

• Can the poor in India access quality health care?
• The impact of training informal health care providers in India