Independent agency to police rural development schemes soon

The regulator is on the lines of independent monitor which funding agencies like ADB have to monitor how their funds are being utilised

Rural development programmes would soon come under live and continuous scrutiny of an independent evaluator.

The Rural Development Ministry is expected to advertise soon for professionals, economists and public policy experts to take up posts in the new agency, sources said.

The agency, approved by the Cabinet two months ago, is to partly replace the evaluation and monitoring division that exists in the ministry. It is to be headed by an eminent economist and would have an advisory committee comprising domain experts, a top official in the ministry said.

The regulator is on the lines of the independent monitor which funding agencies like Asian Development Bank have to keep an eye on how well their funds are utilised.

The proposal is part of Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh’s agenda to clean up the ministry of leakages, and came alongside his request to Comptroller and Auditor General to do an evaluation of the UPA Government’s most expensive scheme National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme a few months ago.

The CAG last week gave a rather bad report card on NREGA reporting losses and leakages of Rs 10,000 crore over five years and advised the ministry to do continuous evaluation of its schemes to set right errors. It even asked the  ministry to set up a mechanism for concurrent evaluation so that mistakes can be corrected while they are being made.

The independent evaluating agency is to use the services of different institutes like National Institute of Rural Development and Tata Institute of Social Sciences to carry out concurrent evaluation of various rural schemes on a continuous basis. These institutes are to keep an eye on the programmes as they are happening, rather than arriving at the scene after the damage is done and giving a report that serves the purpose of a post mortem at best, sources said.

The Ministry of Rural Development at present sanctions funds as per the labour budget presented by various states and does not do anything beyond it. But an independent office run by professionals rather than bureaucrats is expected to keep an eye on the scheme after funds are disbursed.  

The funds for the agency are expected to be raised partly from the various schemes themselves. For instance, a portion of the administrative expense funds of the NREGA is expected to flow to the new agency being set up, sources said.

According to a top official in the ministry, the new agency would not require any special allocation as the ministry has an existing evaluation and monitoring division, whose funds can be transferred to this agency.

The CAG report has criticised the ministry for the poor performance of NREGA, saying that  the average number of workdays clocked by NREGA beneficiaries has come down dramatically from 53 to 47 from 2007 to 2011. It has also pointed out how the poorest states have received the least amount of funds under the scheme. It says that Bihar and Uttar Pradesh whose poor comprise 49% of the nation's poor got just 20% of funds under NREGA.