On my way

Indian defence purchase decision a blow to UK aid strategy?

2012-02-01T21:23:00.000-08:00

I hope not...but there were a few interesting statements made yesterday over India's decision, in a $10 bn deal, to prefer the French fighter jet Rafale over the Eurofighter, manufactured by BAE, in which the British group BAE has a stake. Excerpts below, from The Hindu -

Prime Minister David Cameron on Wednesday led an attack on India for selecting French firm Dassault Rafale for a mega deal to supply fighter jets ignoring British claims as MPs and the media accused New Delhi of “ingratitude,” arguing that Britain gave millions of pounds in aid to India...

...MPs and right-wing media questioned the wisdom of giving aid to India if it persisted in “snubbing” Britain. India's decision was described as much a failure of British diplomacy as a personal setback to Mr. Cameron in his campaign to establish Britain as a “partner of choice for India.”

In the Commons, his senior Conservative Party colleague and a contender for the party leadership David Davis called for him to pull his full weight to get India to change its mind pointing out that “we give aid to India many times more than what France gives.”

Another Conservative MP Peter Bone said it was a “myth” that “doling out billions of pounds out to countries like this exerts any influence whatsoever on the decisions made by those governments when purchasing equipment.”

“We need to slash the international development money and invest the billions saved to help hard-pressed British families,” he said...

...The right-wing Daily Mail said the contract was lost despite the government claims that the U.K.'s £1billion aid package to India would help secure the order. It recalled that the Secretary of State for International Development Andrew Mitchell justified aid to India last year on grounds that it would facilitate selling Typhoon to India...

This outrage is particularly interesting in the light of this piece of news where UK's Ministry of Defence wants to be an 'intelligent customer' which means among other things, that British manufacturers will need to compete to be supply equipment.

And as always, for the few that might still think otherwise, all aid is political!

On posturing by MFIs

2012-02-01T07:16:00.000-08:00

MS Sriram has an article on MFIs, where he insists on the importance on 'modesty' as an important personal and organisational attribute in general, doing business, but especially when working with the poor.

When Mexico's Compartamos, one of the largest MFIs in Latin America, was a not-for-profit, it was not really questioned much on its "sustainability" issue. The moment it became a bank, and particularly after it issued shares in the secondary market, several eyebrows went up. Fundamentally nothing had changed with regard to Compartamos vis-a-vis the clients. In case of Bolivia's BancoSol, the differences between the profit orientation and the social orientation became very sharp, with those with a social orientation moving back to a not-for-profit model leaving the people with commercial orientation to continue the mainstream banking operations.

Does hit home, with microfinance in India. However, we need to see 'modesty' not just in terms of lifestyle, but also in terms what we think we have achieved, especially in development

Helping our MPs learn

2012-01-23T09:16:00.000-08:00

There are many reasons why MPs should have more and better quality support staff - MPs are supposed to serve the interests of their constituency by ensuring that the laws that get passed are good for them in particular and for the nation at large. Without adequate support staff who they can rely on for information and advice on laws, policies and upcoming legislations, MPs would have a hard time even understanding proposed legislation, much less proposing their own.

Doug and Suvojit, on livemint

UID: A uniquely nonsensical debate

2012-01-16T05:58:00.000-08:00

UID is taking heat from both the right and left these days. On the left, activists claim that the program is overly invasive and restrictive. From the right, critics within the government make nearly the opposite claim – that the program is neither invasive nor restrictive enough. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to question the logic of the UID program, some of which we shall raise below, but many of the criticisms that have achieved prominence in the press recently make little sense. It’s time we put these nonsensical criticisms behind us and have a real debate over the course this important program should take...

More here, on livemint

Another Lant Pritchett master-class

2012-01-12T10:05:00.000-08:00

This time, on intepreting results from evaluations and the political economy of policy interventions under test.

The genius of the CCTs in Mexico and in Brazil was not about how to get kids in school but rather about how to use the fact that almost all kids already were in school to generate welfare loss minimizing but nevertheless politically powerful symbolism to expand cash transfers. Many of these transfers were conditioned on the enrollment of children in age groups with near-universal enrollment. (In Brazil in 2001, for example, enrollment at ages 9–12 exceeded 95%.) As a strategy for getting kids into school, as a recent J-PAL note attests, this makes CCTs highly cost-ineffective. Does this make the transfers a silly giveaway or a political master stroke—maximizing the political symbolic value of a cash transfer while minimizing the burden on the recipients of conditions? Ask yourself: What did the designers think?

Miguel Székely, one of the designers of PROGRESA, writes, “The real underlying objective of external donors/investors in some circumstances might not be generating impact, but rather making the statement that they are supporting a particular cause. In such cases, the objective might well be a noble and legitimate one, and the measure of success will be the flow or resources itself, rather than its final impact, but neither the donor/investor nor the executor might have incentives to invest in evaluation.”

In other words, one common narrative—that the scaling up of CCTs is a good example of evidence based policy making because the use of randomization in the design of PROGRESA provided solid evidence that it was an effective program and hence other countries adopted a CCT because of this solid evidence—has it almost exactly backwards. The impact evaluation proved that PROGRESA was cost ineffective if it was considered as a mechanism to increase schooling. Everyone involved in the design knew this. They were not imposing the conditionality to get the behavior conditioned upon, but to get the transfer itself.

For the sake of a level playing field in Uttar Pradesh

2012-01-08T19:40:00.000-08:00

But the draping that is to happen today was preceded by much drama on Sunday. When officials from the departments that had built the statues came to mask them as per the poll panel's directives, it realised that it didn't have enough sheets to cover them. In all, nearly 100 statues have to be covered in Lucknow and Noida.

It didn't end there. Soon, realisation dawned upon the authorities that that the Election Commission was yet to send an official order for covering the statues. So the covers came off. But, the Lucknow District Magistrate had said on Sunday evening that they had received the order and it would be implemented from Monday onwards.

This is in reference to the recent Election Commission order to cover all Mayawati's statues and also those of her election symbol, the elephant - which thanks to her extravagant construction spree, are omnipresent in Lucknow and Noida - so that Mayawati and her party dont get any undue advantage in the upcoming state elections.

Sen does a Sainath...

2012-01-07T11:06:00.000-08:00

in The Hindu, picking on (rather politely) the Indian media for their obsession with the bold and the beautiful in our society. So multi-crore corporate subsidies don't make for any negative news or critical analysis (unless there is a whiff of corruption), while wage/food guarantee schemes get scrutinised incessantly and often get panned for poor implementation and wastage.

An excerpt -

...The impact of India's division between the privileged and the non-privileged can also be seen in the political power of the advocates of continuing — and expanding — subsidies on fuel use, even those that go particularly to the relatively rich (such as petrol for car owners), or of fertilizers, which yield major transfers of a regressive kind, even as they help with agricultural production. It is possible to redesign these fiscal arrangements to introduce more economic rationality, greater environmental awareness, and the demands of equity with efficiency. The political support for tolerating — and defending — the present profligacy in catering to the relatively better off contrasts sharply with the fiscal alarm bells that are sounded whenever proposals for helping the poor, the hungry, the chronically unemployed come up...

Lant Pritchett on CCTs for education

2012-01-04T12:22:00.000-08:00

...“seeing” that teachers should be more accountable for a quality of schooling experience that would retain students however requires seeing what even a child can see, but which the state has no interest in seeing, and hence no capability to see. Holding powerful teachers accountable, while cost-saving and learning increasing, is politically difficult. Even giving poor people a choice in where their children attend school is politically difficult to get by the educationist lobby. But holding poor people accountable is always politically easy...

Lant Pritchett - please read in full

Lant Pritchett explains why CCTs are not the way to go if we really want to improve the quality of education in our schools, and are not just happy getting more bums on the seat. Pritchett explains why education cannot be approached purely from the demand side - and there is plenty of evidence to back this argument - including some plainly obvious data on enrolment and quality of learning among kids in countries like India, Ghana and many others. Clearly, unless teachers can be held accountable (whether hiring contract teachers en-masse is even possible is a different question altogether) in some form, there is not much governments can do to improve education outcomes among children.

Update on 12/1: a response from Berk Ozler, arguing that more school in itself may be a good thing

Minister sacked by Mayawati sobs uncontrollably

2012-01-02T09:27:00.000-08:00

Who said politicians don't have a heart!

A talisman for 2012

2011-12-22T21:22:00.000-08:00

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;

Where knowledge is free;

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;

Where words come out from the depth of truth;

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;

Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action---

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

Rabindranath Tagore

The real Tarhir Square

2011-12-21T02:36:00.000-08:00

Read Mariz Tadros' account of the protests against the army's brutal treatment of women in recent days. Excerpts:

While women took part fully in the uprisings that led to the ousting of Mubarak, this demonstration was different: they were more than participants, they were the leaders. They spoke, and everyone listened. They shouted and everyone- men and women responded back . And it was not just the urban women who were leading, it was the village women in their black gallabiyyas who were raising their voices and everyone answering back even louder. As people marched around and around in Tahrir Square carrying banners against the military, carrying a large picture of the woman who was stripped and dragged from her hair across the square by a soldier, while another soldier was shown about to stomp her bare stomach with his shoe-the determination not to let this rest was strong.

Anyone who equates Jantar Mantar with Tahrir Square has absolutely no idea what they are talking about...

Weekday bloggers

2011-12-20T22:24:00.000-08:00

From my Google Reader - The blue bars stand for the 'Items Posted' and the orange bars for 'Items Read'

Bloggers on my reading list like their weekends off...and so do I

Unsustainable development can be hard to tell

2011-12-20T22:13:00.000-08:00

A recent Fight Entropy post had me thinking - can you really tell unsustainable development when you see it? For that matter, can you even tell sustainable development when you see it? Questions that come to mind immediately - 'where' are you standing when you see it; 'who' are you, 'what' colour are your lenses and 'when' did you see it?

This is no excuse for unsustainable development - but a plea that knowing what it is can be pretty damn hard sometimes. Yes, one needs to spot early signs that things are not quite right - with our battery of M&E tools and evaluation techniques, we are probably in a better place than we ever were...

But it also comes down to this - at the micro-level, 'development' setting typically has 'us' - a bunch of (relatively) better-off folks - using aid and making value judgements for 'them', whose power to choose is limited. And labels such as sustainable or unsustainable are what we decide to attach on to each other's projects and programmes (amongst ourselves) and sometimes on to 'their' traditional practices. We usually have a choice. Do they?

Recycling a gem: logframe and Gandhi

2011-12-09T01:43:00.000-08:00

Try logframe-ing a revolution!
H/T - Duncan Green

Pushing an Indian agenda for aid

2011-12-05T19:30:00.000-08:00

India is no longer dependent on aid, and this independence may allow India to get more out of the aid it receives. It has only to ask

Full post here, on livemint

More lessons from Millennium Villages

2011-11-28T15:51:00.000-08:00

Using household survey data from Sauri Millennium village and propensity score matching methodology, this paper sought to analyze the impact of the Millennium Village Project (MVP) interventions on agricultural productivity and income. The results show a significant increase in agricultural productivity and an insignificant income effect, which can be attributed to small land sizes and over-reliance on agriculture. The results indicate the need to diversify economic activities and a revision of the assumptions on the relationship between productivity and income, on which the MVP, and many other rural development policies, rely on

Abstract, from a recent paper (HT: CGD) from an indepent study that examines the income effects from the massively funded and over-hyped big bang that is the Millennium Villages Project.

Given the taregted approach of the MVs, the researchers had no way to implement a randomised design - meaning, that there was the danger that the carefully chosen MVs are likely to show basic characteristics that could bias the impact data in its favour. The paper does report that -

...MVP households on average have household heads who are more educated, have a higher average number of household members and a higher dependency ratio as compared to the non-MVP households.

On average, households in MVP also have better housing (more semi-permanent and permanent structures) than in non-MVP. MVP households are also more reliant on agriculture as compared to the non-MVP households. Lastly, the average land size for MVP households is higher than in non-MVP households, with the mean land acreage for MVP households being 0.53 hectares as compared to 0.41 hectares for non-MVP households...
In spite of all of the above, the MVs seem not to show any significant rise in incomes. They do show increased agricultural productivity, but this advantage fails to translate into higher incomes for the households themselves. The authors unfortunately don't go much further in explaining why this might be so and leave us with the following possible explanation -

...This unexpected gap between the theoretically expected and actual behavior of actors might be explained by structural conditions faced by small-scale farmers, and in particular their initial very low productivity, the large number of household members and the constraints for production increase imposed by the small scale of land. This ultimately results in a very high proportion of production allocated to self-consumption, including the production increment due to (even substantial) productivity gains...

Does that then mean that the MVP has a potential impact on household nutrition? Not sure Lawrence would agree! In any case, this is not the last we will hear about Sachs and his inscrutable MVs...more lessons from MVs indeed - sadly, those outside seem to be the only ones taking them seriously...

India's IAS: a steel frame or a steel cage?

2011-11-23T07:28:00.000-08:00

Sardar Patel famously called the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) the “steel frame” of India’s government machinery. He, and many others, viewed the IAS as the solid foundation upon which the rest of the bureaucracy rested, a bastion of the nation’s best and brightest providing unfailing support to others in government. To this day, even with vastly increased opportunities in the private sector, the IAS continues to attract India’s best and brightest. As Harvard’s Lant Pritchett notes, would-be IAS officers must undergo an application process that makes getting in to Harvard look like a walk in the park. Yet, despite the exceptional talent within the IAS, the institution no longer serves the greater interest of the country. Instead, there are reasons to believe that it might be hampering the country’s development.

Excerpt from our article on livemint

Getting Fresh Blood into the Indian Government

2011-11-18T03:41:00.000-08:00

Prashant Agarwal proposes a fellowship program as a way of getting fresh blood into the civil service. http://www.livemint.com/2011/11/15220228/India-led-by-young-Indians.html

I think this is a great idea (and coincidentally, Suvojit and I were just tossing around a very similar idea).

I haven't checked this out but perhaps it is exactly what Agarwal is proposing.

Update: This too looks interesting.

UN Peacekeepers Deliver More than Asked For

2011-11-09T03:37:00.000-08:00

Ooops.

Five thousand cholera victims in Haiti have launched legal action demanding hundreds of millions of dollars in damages from the United Nations for an epidemic widely blamed on UN peacekeepers, lawyers said Tuesday. The epidemic has killed 6,600 people and infected about 475,000 since it erupted one year ago. Several studies have indicated the cholera was introduced by Nepalese peacekeepers and lawyers acting for the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti have filed a legal claim demanding $100,000 dollars for each death and $50,000 for each person made sick.

Source.

Toilets for all

2011-10-22T22:56:00.000-07:00

Could he (Union Rural Development Minister, Jairam Ramesh) name one area where individual contribution would make a difference? His answer is surprising: toilets.

“To my mind, the single biggest issue that we face is sanitation,” he says. “Fifty-eight per cent of all open defecations in the world are in India. Fifty to seventy-five per cent of all Indian women defecate openly. It is a national shame, a national blot. We are trying to entice people to use toilets. We have built lakhs of toilets but people aren’t using them. We are trying to start a major Clean India campaign; communication programmes and such.”

In this article, the author seems to have been struck by a new realisation - that toilets are important. And that's part of the problem. Sanitation is urgent, and complex - and should have been our priority five decades back.

The great sanitation stink

2011-10-14T05:03:00.000-07:00

Recently, addressing a workshop of state secretaries in-charge of Rural Water Supply and Sanitation, Jairam Ramesh, the minister for rural development, termed it a shame that 58% of the world’s open defecation happens in India. Anyone who has worked on sanitation would take this figure with a pinch of salt, knowing how misleading sanitation coverage figures are – possibly not just in India, but all over the developing world.

A country that aspires to be a global superpower lags behind numerous other poorer countries when it comes to a ranking on the basis of the proportion of population with access to improved sanitation. In India, sanitation seems to suffer from a policy blind-spot, being overshadowed as policymakers miss the link between sanitation, hygiene, health and productivity. This has led to numerous unsuccessful policy attempts to address the issue. There are of course hundreds of successes, but rarely have they been replicated or scaled up to a degree that matters. In this piece, we would like to highlight a few broad challenges.

Excerpt from our piece published on livemint

The winner among Indian cities...

2011-10-14T04:58:00.000-07:00

Which Indian city has the best infrastructure, the most attractive culture? In a nation where Nasscom says 90% of all graduates are unemployable, which city produces many times more competent people than it can hire? Which city is our greatest net exporter of talent? Which city will win in 20 years?

See here for the answer and more

Idle Scheming - why India's Centrally Sponsored Schemes need trimming

2011-10-04T20:17:00.000-07:00

Centrally sponsored schemes, or CCSs, have been taking a lot of heat recently. Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar has accused the government of using centrally sponsored schemes to meddle in states’ affairs. Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi agrees. Even the Planning Commission, in its approach paper to the twelfth plan, admits that CSSs have been plagued by “poor implementation, duplication, lack of convergence and suboptimal results.” (Though we imagine the authors of the report would disagree with Kumar and Modi on whose fault this is.) As reluctant as we are to agree with a person like Modi, he and Kumar are right –the profusion of centrally sponsored schemes not only erodes state’s rights but also hinders development. The confusing morass of government policies that are centrally sponsored schemes is in drastic need of a good pruning.

Excerpt from our piece published on livemint

Bihar seeks inputs

2011-09-28T06:27:00.000-07:00

into its 12th Plan - see here. And here for the Government of Bihar's impressive website

Reporting impact? Be specific

2011-09-28T05:48:00.000-07:00

David Mckenzie recommends that when reporting impact, The World Bank Group ought to move away from throwing out numbers as -

Data from IFC clients across all regions shows 2.4 million jobs provided in 2010, of which 665,000 were jobs for women

In 2009, our clients provided 2.2 million jobs, including nearly 514,000 in the manufacturing and services sectors

to more specific, evidence-based reporting such as -

Land titling reform in Rwanda increased female land ownership and tripled the proportion of women who invested in their land through soil conservation.

A pilot program in Jordan found job vouchers quadrupled the share of married graduates in employment 8 months after graduation (see page 301 in the WDR, ongoing work is measuring the longer-term impacts).

Cambodia's scholarship program, supported by the World Bank, increased school attendance rates of adolescent girls by about 25 percentage points.

In doing so, he makes several good points about why the present 'impact' statistics are not just misleading, but also quite inaccurate. Not to pull up the bank on this one, it really is the standard mode for reporting impact. Its not very unlike the hordes of NGO signboards one sees in poor communities. Any change to status quo is definitely welcome.