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Journalism of Courage
Social welfare was again envisaged as the keystone to P. Chidambaram’s budget architecture. While the allocation for education — with the accent on primary school education — was enhanced by 34.2 per cent; that for health and family welfare was raised by 21.9 per cent. Higher allocations for the social sector account for a fourth of the hike in total budget expenditure. We would have cheered this effort with more conviction if we were also confident that these huge allocations will reach the desired target groups and, most important of all, have the desired outcomes.
There are in fact few people in the country more aware of the many slips between the lip and the budget list, than the finance minister himself. That was why in his budget speech of 2005, Chidambaram had expressly underlined that “outlays do not necessarily mean outcomes”. He then pencilled out his idea of an “outcome budget” as a mechanism to measure the development outcomes of all major programmes, which in turn would inform administrative action and policy-making. Two years and two budgets later, as the UPA financially pumps up its eight flagship social welfare programmes, the outlays-outcomes equation assumes even greater importance and urgency.
This is by no means a new dilemma. The negatives of a top-down, highly bureaucratic delivery system coupled with weak auditing mechanisms are well-understood. Even the new idea of an outcome budget hasn’t quite worked, precisely because the monitoring procedures in place are less than satisfactory. As development experts have pointed out, we need to rejig the entire evaluation process so that feedback on the government’s various schemes and programmes emanates, not from those who have the most to gain from dissembling, but from those who have the most to lose if things go awry: the recipients themselves. The whole process of project evaluation requires to be demystified and decentralised so that outlays are known and the outcomes, transparent.
