WATCH THE FULL VIDEO
CPR BUDGET SOCIAL SECTOR SCHEMES

Watch the full video (above) of the panel discussion on ‘Tracking Government Spending: Challenges in Social Policy Financing’ featuring Rathin Roy (Director, National Institute of Public Finance and Policy); Alok Kumar (Adviser, NITI Aayog); Jeffrey Hammer (Senior Visiting Fellow, CPR); TR Raghunandan (Adviser, Accountability Initiative & Former Indian Administrative Service Officer) and moderated by Avani Kapur (Fellow & Director, Accountability Initiative, CPR). The panel marked the completion of ten years of the Accountability Initiative at CPR since it’s founding.

Despite significant investments in social welfare programmes, it is widely acknowledged that implementation is India’s Achilles heel and public service delivery is often plagued by inadequate quality, corruption and accountability failures. Yet, a discussion on the links between design and implementation is often constrained by the lack of evidence on the processes through which policies are translated on the ground.

What are the emerging trends of social policy financing in India? What should be the role of the Union Government in social policy financing in an era of more cooperative federalism? What is the role of technology in enabling a more efficient public finance management system? What is the optimal allocation of functions and capacities required across all levels of government to ensure an outcome-focussed financing system? By placing the current evidence on the processes involved in the delivery of social policies at the front and centre, this session aimed to revisit the current design of social policy financing given the recent changes in India’s fiscal architecture.

The panel was organised as part of the second edition of CPR Dialogues, held on 2nd and 3rd March 2020 at the India Habitat Centre. Addressing the theme of Policy Perspectives for 21st-century India, CPR Dialogues 2020 provided a window to the India of the future. Experts from around the country and the world engaged with and debated these very significant development and policy challenges that India faces in the coming decade.

ThePrint India was the digital partner for the event.

Media coverage of the session can be found below:

Civil servants and politicians aren’t worried about outcomes of govt spending: Experts by ThePrint
Videos of other panel discussions organised as part of CPR Dialogues 2020 can be found below:

CPR Dialogues 2020- Inaugural Address by Hon’ble Subrahmanyam Jaishankar
CPR Dialogues 2020- At the Threshold of a New Decade: Navigating the Emerging Geopolitical Landscape
CPR Dialogues 2020- Rights in Times of AI: Emerging Technologies and the Public Law Framework
CPR Dialogues 2020- What Would Happen if We Were to Believe in Indian Agriculture?
CPR Dialogues 2020- Creating an Inclusive Economy in a Digital World
CPR Dialogues 2020- What Would it Take to Build a 21st-century State for India? Launch of CPR’s State Capacity Initiative
CPR Dialogues 2020- Technology and Administrative Reform: Experience from India and the World
CPR Dialogues 2020- The Air Pollution Crisis: Making Political Salience Count
CPR Dialogues 2020- Article 21 and India’s Social and Economic Rights
CPR Dialogues 2020- Challenges in Public Education: Balancing State and Non-State Actors
CPR Dialogues 2020- Emerging Trends in Indian Politics
CPR Dialogues 2020- Are India’s Financial Institutions in Crisis? Understanding India’s Economic Slowdown
CPR Dialogues 2020- The Role of Ideas in Shaping Policy
CPR Dialogues 2020- Indo-US Relations
CPR Dialogues 2020- Land and the Constitution: Solving Land Conflict in India
CPR Dialogues 2020- Political Elites and Local Bureaucratic Capacity