PRI Capacity Building & Training

The 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments ushered in the Panchayati Raj in India. Panchayati Raj Institution(PRI) is a three-tier system in the state with elected bodies at the village, block, and district levels. The rural mathematics of the vote in the Panchayat election has become highly political in nature due to the channeling of government scheme funds through the PRI. There are voices emerging on corruption at this basic level. Budget expenditure for Panchayat elections runs in lakhs for no other reason. Many gram pradhans are becoming powerful by grabbing resources meant for the welfare of the people whom they represent. In my opinion, PRI has embarked on one thing for sure, i.e., decentralized benefits of corruption. Looking on the positive side, infrastructure development and money are returning to the village economy through this arrangement. PRI has brought more of a sense of local governance to rural India.

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.” - Lord Acton, English historian and moralist of the 19th century.

“All power corrupts, but some must govern.” - John le Carre, British ex-intelligence officer and novelist of the 20th century.y

Gram Panchayat is getting involved in planning, nd execution, and monitoring of the various public schemes. There is a lot of funding available at the local level with the decentralization of power through PRI. A barely educated Gram Pradhan is dealing with huge amounts of money under social security schemes, namely MGNREGS, BRGF, TFC, SFC, Indira Awas Yojna, etc. PRI representatives are not professionals, but the only voices of the people. Management takes money and people. With such an amount of cash flow, processes can't be left on the shoulders of either overburdened representatives or volunteers in the committees. It is more necessary to invest in human resources with knowledge and raise the amount of operational expenses (salary). A Nayab Sarpanch gets less than a thousand rupees per month as an honorarium in Odisha. How can such a person give full attention to the responsibilities?

The idea of a managed transition of power in Panchayati Raj is still a delusion unless leaders of the community emerge by breaking conservative, male-supporting, social structures. Most of the elected representatives of PRIs are illiterate and semi-literate. They have negligible knowledge about PRIs and no operational skills required for local governance. Capacity building and training (CB&T), particularly in an ongoing process that focuses on creating new leaders, especially women, and knowledge transfer at the grassroots level of democracy

I have attended a few training sessions in conference halls given to PRI members. Most of the training focuses largely on content and has a minimal focus on the mode of delivery. Lectures/PowerPoint presentation mode of training is theoretically sound, but may not be absorbed well by an audience with a bare minimum literacy amid rural backgrounds. Research has demonstrated that adults learn six to seven times more through practice and feedback than through lectures, yet far too many capacity-building programs consist of classroom sessions or self-study modules. I don't have backing on any conclusive study, but exposure visits and study tours conducted have more recipients in rural India.

There is a growing focus on the development of a two-tier cadre of resource persons, i.e., the master resource persons and district/ block resource persons. Most of the states provide short-duration inputs (5-15 days) with the help of State Institutes of Rural Development (SIRD). Training sessions in government workshops have created a pool of trainers, but the quality is lacking in the human resources. There is no long-term systematic strategy employed by the government. The lack of a strong monitoring and evaluation system for training doesn't help in assessing the impact of such training. The effective establishment of PRIs as a strong node for local governance remains a distant reality until these gaps are filled properly. Organizations (NROs) such as Tripti(Odisha), SERP (AP), Jeevika (Bihar), and Kudumbashree (Kerala) are slowly grooming the leaders through Livelihood Mission who have sufficient knowledge of PRI & various other schemes.

Kaushik Basu (in October 2013): "Overall economic growth is important, but the poor should not have to wait until its benefits trickle down to them; with the right anti-poverty policies, governments can encourage trickle-up growth as well." Building public institutions is a slow process, with frequent regression, but over time, PRI will become a strong, inclusive, and democratic institution in the spirit of the constitutional amendment. Progress is a painstaking task, and we have a long way to go!

Visit for Social Audit of NREGS - 2

What is a social audit? It is better to have an idea of the concept in the first place.  Social_Audit_Report is uploaded to the NREGS website. But almost all of the community seems to be completely unaware of the documentation part. The best part of these meetings is the opportunity to meet office bearers and government officials on the same day.

When the government makes the schedule for a social audit in October, it reviews work done/in progress from April to September. SA was originally scheduled in October, but due to a cyclone, it was completed in December. Advertisements were given in three Oriya newspapers, giving dates and locations of the social audit meeting. Local NGO was invited to attend the meetings, yet no provision of funds was available for community mobilization through local NGOs. This was all done when Gram Rozgar Sevak (GRS) [working personnel for NREGS at the Village level] were on strike. Their online petition is worth a read on the problem faced at the implementation level.

Verification of Documents, grievances submitted, and Issues was tackled in the meeting with sincerity. Whatever issues were raised, action was taken on them.  The normal complaint was the wrong account number given by the beneficiaries of bank accounts. One person complained about having no job card. He later said that he was a migrant and belonged to a well-to-do family. Since this card is one more government paperwork done for free, he was eager to get it in the hope of the anticipated benefits. Ensuring faster wage payment to beneficiaries under MGNREGS is the process lacuna. Payment within 15 15-day deadline is sometimes stretched to a full month, which came into the limelight.

According to the guidelines of MGNREGA, a Gram Sabha is the prime institution of planning and execution of MGNREGA. So much in writing, but activities of Vigilance and Monitoring Committees (VMCs) at the Panchayat level are in hibernation all over Odisha. NREGS works for purposes like common grazing and livelihood, which are not taken much into consideration. NREGS website is great. But even the BPL (as per the 1997 census in Odisha) doesn't seem to be properly fed in that. I have highlighted with a red circle in the picture above and brought it to the notice of the concerned authority.

There is no convergence that the household has taken advantage of, such as the scheme like IAY/RSBY of the government.  Even demand generation suffers due to a lack of initiative in the community. As per government officials, not much work can be generated if a lot has already been done in previous years. There is a limit of demand that can be achieved under the guidelines of NREGS. The demand scheme has been converted into a target scheme by the officers under pressure from the government to show numbers.  That was the most important lesson that came out of this exercise.

Social Audit has merely been reduced to an exercise for checking numbers, as few people complained about the quality of work, and let the accountable pay for corruption. Even mighty monitoring tools like social audits can become grievance redress mechanisms only in the hands of the dull community. The social audit may have helped in awareness generation, but a lot of work needs to be done for community engagement.

Visit for Social Audit of NREGS

NREGA funds are used for natural resource management activities by generating wage employment for the poor as well as strengthening their livelihood resource base. I will ask readers to go through these two articles :[ Rural job scheme: Can we get it right? and NREGA social Audit: Myths and Reality ] on Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) before going forward.

There is a social audit of MNREGS going on in Balangir district from 22-10-2013 to 26-10-2013. I attended three such meetings as an observer only. I attended social audit at Kutenpali, Jharmunda and Kandajuri Gram Panchayat of Loisingha Block. Loisingha Block consist of 18 G.Ps with 108 Villages and is 22 km away from district headquarter. The officers, Sarpanch and GRS were present for the meeting on time. Yet, there was lack of people attending the meeting held at Panchayat Bhavan. The registered person data is taken from NREGA website for the financial year 2013-2014. I have given distance from Block Office to show their remote locality.

G.P.	Distance from Block Office	Registered				In Meeting
		Household	Persons	Male	Female	Total	Male	Female
Kutenpali	7 Km	674	1899	1076	823	40	40	0
Jharmunda	12 Km	661	1686	983	703	0	0	0
Kandajuri	15 Km	457	1075	596	479	7	7	0

Key Findings -

1. People were keeping themselves busy in a game of cards, but were unaffected by any meeting. This attitude of the local people was fatal to their own development. Hence, all the blame for the failure of the government scheme can't be solely put on the state. The lack of participation of the local population was making the whole event a flop show.

2. GP with 40 people was considered a success by the lock office. It was later told that such low attendance of 5-10 people without any local NGO participation is prevalent in another block of Balangir district. With the support of a community-based organization, the number of participants can rise up to 80-100.

3. There was a notice attached to the Panchayat office, but no meetings were held on the importance of social audit. Adding to this limited communication, an effective strategy of rural communication through the voice was also utterly discarded by the government. Neither the NGO nor any community organization was used for mobilizing the public.

4. Land development through an individual project is an equally good option with a community project in a remote location. Due to hilly terrain and poor connectivity, there is greater participation in NREGS in backward GPs. Most of the people working as labour in NREGS are tribal and BPL cardholders.

5. The Gram Panchayat must own the data it collects; Information is a basic tool for planning. Information relevant to each area, like population, Infrastructure, and natural resources database, is rarely available for use. Even though NREGA data is available on the internet, it is not available to the common man in the village. Virtual transparency may give temporary relief to the government officials, whereas the reality is that villagers have to meander through a cobweb of data to search and find what they are looking for.

6. Surplus labor used in NREGS can generate productive assets that can be eco-friendly in nature. The asset base of the poor, both individual (for example, Land leveling, reclamation of soil, bunding, constructing small ponds) as well as collective assets (for example, regeneration of common lands, water harvesting structures, group irrigation facilities, etc) can be strengthened through this scheme. Migration of unskilled labor can't be stopped for virtually 30-40 days of work.

In NREGA, government officials and PRI members had used fraud measures like “creating fake muster rolls, inflated bills, exaggerated measurements, and non-existent works, all through bribes and cuts from wage seekers" to make money. What is needed of us is a social audit, the best tool we have for monitoring, using community participation to curb such fraud activities. Development from design is not primarily about selecting the right people for the job. It is about setting the right processes, standards, and procedures, followed by continuous adherence to them. I will end with the words of Omnia Marzouk, President, IofC International: 'Nothing lasting can be built without a desire by people to live differently and exemplify the changes they want to see in society.'

Decentralisation - Chronology of Attempts and Committee Reports

The details of the history of attempts to promote decentralized planning from the first plan onwards to the mid-eighties is summarized in the table below:

Why Decentralization?

The main problem of centralized governance is lack of knowledge about local circumstances due to the geographical distance. It also creates psychological distance of government officials from citizens of the remote part. Best case in favor of decentralizing government is that it creates the inclusive institutions. Autonomy for local population to have a voice in government for decision making enables development. But, Political decentralization has no meaning if there is no fiscal decentralization.

Taking from the blog post written long back - As Oates (1993) explained, "the basic economic case for fiscal decentralization is the enhancement of economic efficiency: the provision of local outputs that are differentiated according to local tastes and circumstances results in higher levels of social welfare than centrally determined and more uniform levels of outputs across all jurisdictions.Although this proposition has been developed mainly in a static context (see my treatment of the "Decentralization Theorem,' 1972), the thrust of the argument should also have some validity in a dynamic setting of economic growth." Fiscal Experts have also concluded that decentralized government poses a threat to the macroeconomic stability and is incompatible with prudent fiscal management. (See Prud’homme, 1995; Tanzi, 1996). Among the fiscal experts a broad consensus has been arrived in the context of Musgrave’s trilogy of public functions, namely, allocation, redistribution, and stabilization, that the function of allocation can be assigned to lower level of governments, the other two would be more appropriate for the national government. Therefore, the macroeconomic management, particularly stabilization policy largely consider as clearly a central function (Musgrave, 1983; Oates 1972). [OP Vohra : Fiscal decentralization and devolution of financial resource]