Monitoring authorities must have the power to sanction penalties, and findings from the monitoring process must be made public
It is an open secret that the Indian state finds it very difficult to motivate its employees to show up to work. Studies on attendance amongst teachers and doctors, for instance, estimate that absenteeism ranges between 25% amongst teachers and up to 40% amongst doctors.
The crux of the problem is well known. Government officials are paid a regular salary, they have minimal supervision and no serious sanctions are imposed for poor performance. Where then are the incentives to turn up for work? Yet there are detailed rules and process for monitoring official performance and imposing disciplinary action. So the issue is not that monitoring systems do not exist but that they seem to be unable to create incentives for performance. Where does the problem lie?
Puzzled by this question, an Accountability Initiative researcher set out to investigate how monitoring mechanisms work in the context of elementary education and examine why they remain ineffective. The study was limited to one district each in Bihar and Madhya Pradesh (MP). Here are some highlights from what the study unearthed.
First and foremost, the monitoring system for elementary education suffers from a simple design flaw?those who are assigned with monitoring roles do not have any sanctioning authority, rendering the monitoring process toothless. After all, if you knew the monitor could not impose sanctions, why would you take the monitoring process seriously. In Bihar the village panchayat is on paper responsible for hiring panchayat-level teachers and monitoring their day-to-day activities. However, the panchayat does not have powers to initiate any action against the teachers it hires. All the panchayat can do is to recommend that action be taken to higher authorities?the block and district?in the education department who take the final decision.
This has two important consequences. One, it can result in serious delays between when the transgression is noted and when action is taken?it can take anything from a month to 6 months for an issue to travel up the bureaucratic chain. Second, it can create a complex power-play between the monitoring and sanctioning authority, making decision-making impossible. In Bihar, block officials claimed that panchayat presidents or mukhiyas were misusing the monitoring system to settle scores with local teachers and thus dismissed many of their recommendations. Mukhiyas, on the other hand, claimed that block officials formed a nexus with teachers and either dismissed panchayat reports or diluted them before forwarding them on to the district officials?who take the final decision. Between these accusations and counter-accusations, teachers got away scot free!
Design issues apart, the bulk of the monitoring responsibility for elementary education rests with block-level officials. But in practice, these officials are expected to spend much of their day responding to unplanned requests that come from the district, making it impossible to fulfil their assigned monitoring tasks effectively. To illustrate, in MP, on the day that the study team interviewed block officers, they found the officers scrambling to respond to a request from the district, to collect information on attendance from all schools in the block and report back to the district within 24 hours. One officer interviewed was candid enough to admit that given the limited time available to him, he was unlikely to provide accurate data in the report! So instead of monitoring ?attendance?, he made a few phone calls and filled up sheets of paper to forward them on.
But perhaps the real impediment to effective monitoring is the power asymmetry between those who are being monitored and those entrusted with monitoring. It is well known that teachers are a powerful political lobby that many administrators would prefer not to confront. In MP, many local officials interviewed said that any action?cutting salaries or decreasing increments?is met with severe resistance from teachers and teacher unions and thus, rather than take decisions themselves, they prefer to pass the buck to other officials. In other instances, officials chose to adopt a sympathetic view of teacher?s indiscretions. Schools are located in remote areas, they argued, and getting there is difficult, so if a teacher is late or absent for a few days, they ?understood?. From the point of view of monitoring teachers it means that monitoring reports may not always be an accurate representation of the reality.
There are some quick fix solutions to these monitoring problems. First, monitoring authorities must also have sanctioning powers. To ensure accountability in the process, an appeal mechanism can be introduced. Second, implementation and monitoring responsibilities must be separated out at the block level so that monitors are not pulled in to other tasks and they can do their jobs effectively. Third, findings from the monitoring process must be placed in the public domain. This may help address problems of accusations and counter-accusations that the study encountered in Bihar. But in the final analysis, no amount of design change will help if the teachers unions and the political patronage they enjoy is not broken. This is a matter of political will and there is no evidence that the political establishment is willing to confront these unions and until then, any reform measure will simply be an effort in tinkering at the edges.
The author is director, Accountability Initiative, and senior research fellow, Centre for Policy Research