Search

Teachers' work in India is impacted by the ongoing restructuring of school education that incorporates simultaneous attempts at reform and regulation. Child-friendly assessment policy instituted by the local bureaucracy leads to intensification of teachers' administrative roles, drawing their attention away from critical pedagogic ones. Limitations in policy interpretation are found to be in response to the official discourse of efficiency that manifests in performative measures of accountability inconsistent with the intended reforms. In this ethnographic case study in an urban middle school for poor, teachers' attempts to comply with instruments of accountability while adapting to changing pedagogic relations with their students and achieve coherence in their identities are examined. The paper draws attention to the contrasts between models of good teaching held by teachers, vis-à-vis the official discourse. It argues for a reworking of the existing model of accountability towards incorporating a cultural-political conception of pedagogy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a comparative assessment of South Africa and India's service delivery improvement strategies, challenges, successes and lessons learnt in advancing their service delivery reform programmes. The cardinal argument in the paper is that the public administrative systems adopted and inherited in the post-democratic epochs in India and South Africa were incapable of meeting the service delivery needs of their respective citizens. They epitomised the traditional and hierarchical public administrative systems that were the object of reforms in the 1990s. The reform initiatives also coincided with global reforms on public administration systems taking place under the aegis of the new public management framework. A key feature of new public management is its application of private-sector ideas to the public sector, such as individual accountability. The paper further undertakes a comparative review of service delivery improvement frameworks of South Africa (Batho Pele) and India (Sevottam) in relation to their objectives and implementation modalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper departs from the analytic lens of citizen versus the state and brings to attention intra-bureaucratic interactions in the wake of Aadhaar by focusing on the ongoing implementation of an Aadhaar Enabled Biometric Attendance System (AEBAS). Based on ethnographic research in a North Indian state, I show how AEBAS' goals of performance evaluation and management were partially, and unintentionally, circumvented by staff members, in part owing to the socio-technical design of the system. I argue that an unintended consequence of projects using digital media technologies to quantify and manage performance is their tendency to produce a performance of management, and that scholars and activists must pay attention to such disjunctures inherent in projects of command and control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2005, the Government of India (GoI) launched an apparently excellent initiative - the Outcome Budget (OB) - with the objective of changing the culture of measuring performance in terms of the amount of money spent against the budgeted allocations, to one of measuring performance in terms of the delivery of the outcomes that people are concerned with. This paper argues that the OB has failed. This has happened because the assumptions of the theory of change underlying the OB have not been satisfied. The failure of the OB has extremely important lessons for the Independent Evaluation Office (IEO), which the GoI has decided to set up. The paper articulates the theory of change underlying the IEO. This theory assumes that policy-makers in India currently demand rigorous impact evaluations of public interventions and will continue to demand such evaluations in future, not because they have to comply with any requirement but because they really want to know the answers to the impact evaluation questions of 'what works, under what conditions does it work, for whom, what part of a given intervention works, and for how much?', so that they may draw appropriate lessons from these answers and use these lessons while designing and implementing public interventions in future. However, given Indian public officials' current culture, the IEO may not make any visible difference in development effectiveness in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on a three-year research project entitled Minority Women Negotiating Citizenship.1 Conceived of in the aftermath of Gujarat 2002, the project studied 75 life-history narratives of Muslim women survivors of communal violence in Gujarat, Hyderabad and Mumbai, in order to map their everyday experiences of negotiating survival, marginalisation and exclusion. While analysing our material we found that our preliminary organising or analytic categories - victim, agent, Muslim, woman, class, location - could not contain the negotiations and fluid 'subjects' of the narratives. The most useful analytic concepts and tools were those being used by the women themselves in their narratives, such as bahar nikalna and sambhalna. These women negotiate a hostile state, poverty, violence, communalised politics and public spaces, and increasingly belligerent community structures on an everyday basis. The complexity of 'identity' and 'agency' as they emerge in the narratives, and the syncretic nature of their everyday negotiations, challenge the rigidity of existing frameworks and dominant discourses on issues of Muslim identity and citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study evaluates the impact of a community-based information campaign on school performance from a cluster randomized control trial in 610 villages. The campaign consisted of eight or nine public meetings in each of 340 treatment villages across three Indian states to disseminate information to the community about its state-mandated roles and responsibilities in school management. No intervention took place in control villages. At baseline there are no significant differences in school outcomes. This paper reports on the first follow up survey that took place two to four months after the intervention. We find that providing information through a structured campaign to communities had a positive impact in all three states. However, there are differences across states in where the impact occurs. The most notable impacts occurred on teacher effort, while impacts on learning were more modest. Some improvements also occurred in the delivery of benefits entitled to students (stipend, uniform and mid-day meal) and in process variables such as community participation in each of the three states. Future research needs to examine whether there is a systematic increase in learning when the impact is measured over a longer time period and whether a campaign sustained over longer duration generates greater impact on school outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The public sector institutions which are responsible for monitoring government performance are not normally open to citizen participation. Yet there is widespread dissatisfaction with the capacities of states to exercise self-restraining functions effectively, and a growing interest amongst citizens to inform, monitor, or participate directly in the workings of these oversight institutions. This paper examines two citizen-initiated efforts in India to engage with public sector oversight functions. In one case, citizens attempted to engage with administrative accountability institutions (monitoring efficiency and quality in the food subsidy system), and in the second, citizens challenged official auditing systems in local government by producing parallel accounts of local spending which contradicted official versions. Both cases involved citizens breaking away from the 'vertical' channels of accountability traditionally open to civil society (lobbying, voting), and insinuating themselves to previously closed 'horizontal' accountability functions (the state's internal procedures for administrative review or financial auditing). We argue that for such 'hybrid' forms of accountability to be effective, it is important that citizens be given legal standing within institutions of public sector oversight, a continuous presence within the oversight agency's work, structured access to official documentary information, including spending records, and the right to issue dissenting perspectives directly to legislative bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Official figures claim that almost 3000 people were killed, and many more injured or displaced, in four days of rioting aimed at the Sikh population of Delhi in late October and early November 1984 following the assassination of Indira Gandhi. This article analyses the efforts made to address the human rights violations that occurred. It argues that as a divided democracy, India has struggled to do justice to the victims, despite multiple commissions of inquiry, compensation schemes and a prime ministerial apology. It argues that this has occurred not simply because of challenges commonly faced by democracies dealing with similar incidents, but also because of the particular problems faced in a context in which we see continuity of rule by a political elite allegedly implicated in the abuse and in which there is acute concern for the survival of a fragile divided polity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accountability is a core democratic value. It envisages that citizens hold the powerful to account for omissions and commissions. Influenced by the global agenda for good governance, the Right to Information (RTI) Act in India was designed to build accountability through transparency. RTI is primarily a result of democratic politics. It emerged from intense grassroots activism - articulating poor and ordinary citizens’ discontent over corruption and other abuses of power. This study is based on six empirical cases of RTI usage in India’s West Bengal province. I argue that even though it is primarily designed to elicit accountability, RTI has emerged as a “seed right” because of its enabling, foundational and evolving dimensions push forward the process of democratisation. When operating individually, our respondents experienced negligible empowerment, but when the relatively powerless citizens organised collectively and were able to work through political institutions such as political parties and CSOs/NGOs, they could convincingly bargain with the powerholders, and elicit some cooperation, if not accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While concepts such as ‘partnership’ are central to the terminology of private–public mix (PPM), little attention has been paid to how social relations are negotiated among the diverse actors responsible for implementing these inter-sectoral arrangements. India's Revised National Tuberculosis Control Programme (RNTCP) has used intermediary agents to facilitate the involvement of private providers in the expansion of Directly Observed Therapy, Short-Course (DOTS). We examine the roles of tuberculosis health visitors (TB HVs) in mediating working relationships among private providers, programme staff and patients that underpin a PPM-DOTS launched by the RNTCP in western Maharashtra. In addition to observations and informal interactions with the programme and participating health providers, researchers conducted in-depth interviews with senior programme officers and eight TB HVs. Framed by a political discourse of clinical governance, working relationships within the PPM are structured by the pluralistic context, social and professional hierarchies and paternalism of health care in India. TB HVs are at the nexus of these relationships, yet remain undervalued partly because accountability is measured through technical rather than social outcomes of the ‘partnership’. Close attention to the dynamics of power relations in working practices within the health system can improve accountability and sustainability of partnerships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As maternal health specialists accelerate efforts towards Millennium Development Goal Five, attention is focusing on how to best improve service accountability to target communities as a strategy for more effective policy implementation. We present a case study of efforts to improve accountability in Orissa, India, focusing on the role of local women, intermediary groups, health providers and elected politicians. We highlight three drivers of success: (1) the generation of demand for rights and better services, (2) the leverage of intermediaries to legitimise the demands of poor and marginalised women and (3) the sensitisation of leaders and health providers to women's needs. We use the concepts of critical consciousness, social capital and ‘receptive social spaces’ to outline a social–psychological account of the pathways between accountability and service effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Increases in government revenue in the state of Andhra Pradesh, India, have enabled provision of welfare benefits without revenue caps, which has removed the need for clientelist intermediaries. In this transition from clientelism, the government has led the way, a different path from other societies where the middle class has initiated political reforms leading to the demise of clientelism. The formerly dominant castes, which continue to control the government, retain greater expectation of clientelist benefits than lower castes, sustaining high-level corruption and caste cronyism in the underbelly of the emerging welfare regime. This study is based on a survey undertaken during the 2009 election for the assembly in Andhra Pradesh that yielded victory for the incumbent Congress regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]