The government will soon be in a position to know exactly where the money it gives a state is spent, especially when it is for the social sector. The Planning Commission, together with the Comptroller and Auditor General, is working out a mechanism, whereby the Centre would not be clueless on what happened to the payments it made to states.
Explaining this mechanism, Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia said it would be a seamless end-to-end connectivity of information on the route taken by each cheque. “So far, we have no idea what happens to the money once we have signed a cheque and got a receipt from the state. The money may remain in the treasury for years and we may never know,” he said explaining the helplessness of the Centre in minitoring the implementation of many social sector schemes.
Under the new technique, he said, the cheque would have a multiple digit number that would have to be matched with the code for the programme it is meant for. The cheque would be transferred only when the two numbers match.
The tracking would continue till the payment reached the implementing authority of a given programme at the district or block level. The system would be ready in 1-2 years, Ahluwalia added.
He was speaking to civil society organisations that have formed an umbrella campaign group called ‘Wada Na Todo Andolan’ and sought a role for non-government organisations (NGOs) in the planning process.
The NGOs have also submitted a mid-term appraisal of the 11th Plan and appealed to Ahluwalia to take their views into account for the next Five-Year Plan.
Ahluwalia, while appreciative of the work done by the NGOs, felt they were pointing in the wrong direction most of the time when they pressured the Centre.
He advised NGOs to exercise their energies on state governments. He said they should constantly confront state governments and ask them why a certain programme for health or education was not doing well there when it was doing well elsewhere.
Ahluwalia also had a word of advice for NGOs on the desirability of public-private partnership in education.
He said NGOs were sounding too alarmist when it came to private participation in education. Fifty per cent of schools in a state like Kerala were either private or aided. In Bihar, which was one of the weakest in terms of human development indicators, 95 per cent of schools were public-funded.
He said the only way to drill in accountability into the system was to make it compulsory for schools to have teachers appointed by local bodies and to make the teachers answerable to these bodies. He also ruled out educational vouchers as a general solution, but said it had been a good intervention wherever it was done.
