Program Evaluation in India.

No national use of evaluation has been more loaded with responsibility, more ambitiously organized, or more intensively conducted than the work of the Program Evaluation Organization (PEO) established by the Planning Commission of India in 1952 to have surveillance over that country's wide-flung community development operations. This has been and still is a battle-test of evaluation in an urgent and fast-changing national program of social and economic development. An early formulation of the objectives of the PEO specified the purposes as follows: to help determine progress or accomplishments against what was intended, to provide guidance, to study nonadopters and nonadoption, to check teaching procedures, to provide evidence of the value of the work, to provide guides for training personnel, and to give villages some evidence and sense. It is clear that PEO in India has marked its first five years by survival; successful and useful prosecution of numerous studies; accumulation of a creditable series of reports; and manifest influence on the policy, program, and methods of community development.