Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-80)
DR CHARLOTTE
SEYMOUR-SMITH,
MRS ARUNA
BAGCHEE AND
MR JEREMY
CLARKE
5 JULY 2004
Q60 Mr Davies: I cannot in any way endorse
this suggestion which is slightly frightening, but it has been
put to me that commentators have suggested that as little as 15%
of development spending through central government reaches its
beneficiaries in some areas. Have you heard allegations of that
kind and can you comment on leakage? Can you comment on leakage,
if that is the polite way of describing it, of funds of that sort?
Have you had any experience of that kind of other donors? Does
the figure of 15% that has been given to me bear any relation
to reality?
Mrs Bagchee: I would not be able
to comment on that particular figure but governance on the whole
is a concern for DFID and it is a growing concern as we move upstream
to do more budget support, because then the donors are going to
have to depend on the government's own systems and processes,
audit and so on.
Q61 Mr Davies: Why are we moving to budget
support if we have this worry?
Mrs Bagchee: I was just going
to answer that. If we look at the governance issue in India, it
is a concern—and I will come back to how DFID deals with
it. But, if you compare India with a number of the other developing
countries, on the whole the governance framework is quite good,
it has an excellent constitution which gives us a parliamentary
democracy; it is based on social inclusion and there are fundamental
rights that are enumerated. There is a fine balance between the
responsibilities of the central and the state governments and
now also locally elected government, which is all a part of that.
If you look at in practice how this constitution has actually
played itself out, again the picture on the whole is quite good.
The executive is kept in check with parliamentary oversight; there
is an open press and media; and the judiciary is quite vigilant,
particularly at the Supreme Court level. So, all of these things
are intact, yet there is a problem of governance because admittedly,
there is still, within this system inefficiencies, there is corruption
and there are some structural problems as well. For instance,
the court system is quite clogged up. Given these things, there
are macro-level governance problems where I think donors can have
much less influence and I will describe what those are, but there
is also the service delivery level of governance issues where
I think it impacts on the poor people more and here the donors,
including DFID, can do quite a lot and that is where we are concentrating.
If we look at the macro-level governance problems, I would say
there are things like too many political parties, quite a lot
of them with single leaders; there are issues with none of the
parties having a very coherent economic agenda; there is the problem
of election expenses being very high and leading to a number of
other problems and things like that. On those, we have to trust
that because it is a functioning democracy, there is some amount
of self-regulation and we have seen over the years, with the logic
of the elections that we have had, regular and quite good quality
elections, now the parties are sort of coming together in two
large coalitions, one slightly left of centre led by the Congress,
and one slightly to the right of the economic agenda lead by the
BJP. There are other signs of self-regulation within the system.
For instance, the short-term focus that most governments had with
very large cabinets and a lot of expenditure being wasteful, that
is slowly being controlled and they have themselves passed an
act now that the total number of cabinet members will be no more
than 15% of the size of the legislature. So, things like that
are happening within that macro level that donors will not be
able to influence a lot, but we have to trust that, because it
is a functioning democracy, these sort of reforms will take place.
Coming to the service delivery side which impacts on the poor
people a great deal, there are inefficiencies and the most important
one of the failings has been on the planning and budgeting side.
The incremental programming that the Government of India had adopted
in its plans and sometimes the World Bank and other donors were
also partly responsible because, every time a new idea struck
somebody, there was a new project, a new programme, separate lines
of budget and separate lines of staff: but a stage has come now
where there are so many schemes that there is need for a proper
convergence to focus all our efforts to see what the outcomes
should be and, as I mentioned a little while ago, that is the
effort now being done on the health side for reproductive and
child health, so a convergence of all the planning, budgeting
etc to see that we are more outcome focused. On corruption as
well, it runs through the system and there is a problem of trying
to control it. We are working through the DBS processes to see
there is much better control of the financial flows through the
system, from the centre to the state and then on to the implementing
agencies. We have been able to influence the state governments
to have medium-term expenditure frameworks and medium-term fiscal
frameworks which give a better picture of how the funds will be
spent, in which sectors, where they are going and so on. There
is also work in service delivery to see that corruption is reduced
by making the bureaucracy more accountable to the clients that
they are supposed to serve. So, to the extent that we are able
to persuade the state governments to go for decentralisation,
to make the school system responsible to the Parent Teachers'
Associations and the village education committees, we are making
them accountable to the clients they serve. A very promising area
in that is also computerisation. In some of the departments like
the Revenue Department which used to be quite highly corrupt,
introduction of IT has enabled a whole business-process re-engineering
to see that, where the leakages used to happen has been to a large
extent controlled. So, these are the levels at which I think donors
can give best international practices, can help and influence
the state governments to reduce corruption and to improve governance,
and that is the level at which we are focusing.
Q62 Mr Davies: That is very interesting
and clearly you have set the problem out in general terms and
the possible basis of improvement. I was trying to get a quantitative
focus on this and particular studies have come up with certain
estimates and let me put this to you to: apparently the Government
of India Planning Commission's own document, "The 10th Five
Year Plan, 2002-07", volume 3 page 104[3],
says that studies of rural development programmes suggest that
the leakage is between 20 and 70%. That would be 80% in the best
case and 30% in the worst on the money being spent actually getting
through to the projects on which it is being spent or to the people
for whose benefit it is being spent. There is a study of Mr Saxena,
ex-secretary to the Planning Commission, published in Office of
Transition Initiatives (OTI) National Resources Perspectives number
66, March 2001[4],
who suggests that actually the figure is 85% leakage. These are
very, very serious figures. Do they correspond to your perception
of the reality of India?
Dr Seymour-Smith: There are clearly,
as Aruna has mentioned, very serious problems of corruption and
leakage. The figures are going to be different depending on the
different schemes.
Q63 Mr Davies: This is not something
that you regard as being inconceivable or unrealistic?
Dr Seymour-Smith: What I wanted
to say is that one of the key objectives—and you will have
gathered from Aruna's answer that we live and breathe this stuff
every day—is that we want our intervention to make this
situation better. Obviously, if we knew that a particular scheme
had horrendously high rates of leakage and was subject to severe
corruption, we would not engage with that scheme. We would want
to know before we chose a scheme, as we have done very carefully
with Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan, for example, that the problems of
leakage and corruption are manageable and that there are opportunities
to make improvements. I think we do have some indications that,
on those centrally sponsored schemes where donors are involved,
that monitoring and scrutiny and systems of audit and accountability
are better and that is a key reason for our involvement. We are
trying to unlock improvements in governance and this is something
that cuts across everything that we are trying to do. We cannot
say that the problem does not exist. It does exist. In some schemes,
it may be worse than others. There are some schemes that work
well and that do reach the intended beneficiaries and we should
not forget those and we are hoping to build on this success, transfer
those experiences and improve the rates at which those schemes
reach the poor.
Q64 Mr Davies: You have a lot of experience
on monitoring and you have systems of monitoring which you are
reasonably happy about, perhaps you could let me know what your
estimate is at the moment of the range of leakage in the schemes
that we are currently supporting.
Dr Seymour-Smith: I could not
do better than the Planning Commission's own figures, I am sure.
Mr Davies: Which you accept are extraordinarily
high: at best 80% of the money goes through, at worst only 30%
and I see that you are nodding on that.
Q65 Ann Clwyd: I would like to follow
on what Quentin was asking and that was supervision. I remember
some years ago going to Orissa to see a project which I had seen
only two years previously which was training nurses. It was actually
managed by the British Council; the British Council only seemed
to visit them once a year and indeed I think we made many criticisms
of that project and it was then acknowledged that really the British
Council had not been as hands-on as they should have been. I wondered
how prevalent this system of management still was and how satisfied
you are with it.
Dr Seymour-Smith: I think you
have raised another key issue which is the balance between on
the one hand too much handholding through a project and supervision
that is too close and will not be sustainable because, when you
stop and the handholding goes away, the recipients will not have
learned to stand on their own feet and manage their own programmes.
With the situation you describe, I am not familiar with that exact
project, but it sounds like perhaps the balance had tipped in
the other direction and not enough support was being provided.
All I can say in relation to our current programmes is that we
do need to consider, and we do consider very carefully the monitoring
and supervisory requirements for each of those programmes and
I would hope that, when the Committee visits, they will not find
programmes that are either being neglected or being excessively
nannied, but you will advise us, I am sure, on the basis of your
visit to India later this year.
Q66 Ann Clwyd: You mentioned the four
states that you are working in and you have touched on some of
the things that you are doing there. I wonder if you could point
to any tangible results where leverage is successful, more successful
then than it will be central government.
Dr Seymour-Smith: Aruna gathered
together some information with which we can provide you after
this session in writing but perhaps Aruna would like to touch
on some of the examples that we drew together in response to that.
Mrs Bagchee: We have a range of
instruments that we use, the projects programmes and DBS, and
it is much easier to show direct attribution at the project level,
so we have a few examples which, as Charlotte said, we will send
afterwards as well where we can report on how many million people
have actually benefited from that particular project. For instance,
in West Bengal on the HIV/AIDS programme, the prevalence, because
of the interventions of this programme, has increased only marginally
from 4.8% in 1995 to 5.5% in 1998 and is considerably less than
Bombay, which would be the comparable area. Similarly, in the
urban poverty project in Calcutta, it helped to improve basic
slum infrastructure to over 350,000 slum dwellers, residing in
some 200 slums in that city and so on. In a country the size of
India, if we give these figures of 1.8 million or 350,000 and
so on, it would not be very impressive given the size of the country.
So, you are absolutely right that it is really in the influence
that these projects have had on the state or national programme
that we should look for the real attribution of what DFID has
brought to the development world in India. Here we find that again,
if we look at the West Bengal public sector reforms, in which
we are now engaged, this is a Communist Party governed state in
which it would be very, very difficult to imagine that they would
take to public sector reform in terms of closing down the government's
public sector units. DFID supported a pilot project explaining
to them how they could be closed down with voluntary retirement,
good benefits and good retraining for the staff who had been made
redundant and so on. This would then check the fiscal drain that
these loss-making units were causing and give the state government
more money to divert to the social sector, education and health.
The pilot project went so well that now they are ready to think
of phase two, covering other sectors like power, transport and
so on and, even at the national level today, when the Communist
parties are supporting the new government led by the Congress,
this is shown as an example of the new Communist culture, that
they are willing to think of public sector reform in the state
which they rule themselves. So, this is the kind of leverage and
influencing the DFID programme has had. We could give a number
of examples again but time is short and we can send this to you[5].
Q67 Chairman: That would be helpful.
Mrs Bagchee: I have already mentioned
DPEP, the District Primary Education Programme, which has run
for a number of years and has now been translated into the Sarva
Shiksha Abhiyaan and it has become a national level education
guarantee scheme of the government. That is the kind of leverage
that we are able to show because of DFID intervention.
Mr Clarke: May I just add to slightly
extend that that we could also point to the fact that DFID assistance
is able to influence more broadly the way in which the government
itself uses its own resources both in terms of its national programmes
and its state level and I think that is an important point to
make and that we could also, I think, give you more information
about this. We can point to increased spending, for example, on
the social sectors in Andhra Pradesh and I think we could also—I
am referring back to the point about leakage that was made earlier
on—highlight some more greater commitments to tackle the
sort of problems, the administrative reforms that are necessary,
financial management, accounting, audit and procurement areas,
which I think are going to address the kind of problems that were
highlighted earlier on and I think that the budget support mechanism
is a particularly good vehicle for being to able to tackle that
agenda and I should say that the World Bank, for example, has
highlighted the efforts of the Andhra Pradesh government in that
regard. They are suggesting that it is not only good practice
but world standard in terms of what they are trying to achieve
and want to use it as an example of how to approach these problems
in other countries. So, I think there are some quite interesting
and important things to highlight on which we can provide more
information if you would like to see it.
Q68 Mr Colman: Coming back to Andhra
Pradesh, it was quite interesting in that you were praising but,
in a sense, you were praising the last Government of Andhra Pradesh
but not the current one and I was fascinated that it seems to
be a long time but it is only a matter of probably about two months
and you have not yet met with the new government which is not
doing what you suggest. Your leverage has come to an end. Plainly,
you will need to have an excellent strategy and I am interested
to know what that is, but are you really going to support a government
that, I would imagine, you are feeling is carrying through fiscal
irresponsibility in providing free electricity to farmers, most
of whom will be quite wealthy farmers, and this is totally in
opposition to everything you have worked on. George Monbiot of
The Guardian would say, "I told you so", but
what do you tell us in terms of this situation where you are providing
blanket support to a government, it is voted out of office and
the new government is coming in and is doing exactly what DFID
said not to do?
Dr Seymour-Smith: I would like
to comment on that by first saying that I met with the new Chief
Minister of Andhra Pradesh, Mr Reddy, very soon after the election
and that he was very clear in saying that he did not repudiate
wholesale the policies of the previous government and indeed he
recognised that many valuable reforms had been undertaken, that
he intended to build on whatever good had been done by the previous
government and, where necessary, to correct any weaknesses and
failings. You mentioned specifically the policy of free power
to farmers and we would indeed consider that that is inadvisable.
However, we do understand and it was made very clear to us by
the Chief Minister and by his officials that the government feels
the need to respond to the distress, the severe distress, of farmers
in Andhra Pradesh. Our concerns are that to respond with free
power to farmers will not actually help the poorest. There will
be a lot of diversion and there will in fact be some reversal
of the gains that have been achieved in terms of discipline in
the power sector and that in fact this will not really help the
poorest farmers. So, were we to enter into a more detailed discussion
with the Government of Andhra Pradesh on that issue, we would
be suggesting things like, why not a lifeline tariff where the
first small amount of power to each consumer is free, which means
that small poor farmers can have a livelihood, but then in excess
of that power should be metered and better-off consumers should
be paying a different price, a more realistic price? I do not
know if the Government of Andhra Pradesh will want us to have
that discussion or whether they will consider that they are going
to take this forward without external assistance. It was certainly
not our impression that the new Chief Minister intends to reverse
the direction of reforms, far from it.
Q69 Mr Colman: I think that my next question
has probably been answered, so if I could quickly substitute one
which is that, given that you are working within basically four
states and providing support to four states, do you think this
is a wise policy? The NGO I have been most impressed by in India
is SEWA, the Self-Employed Women's Association that you call ILO-SEWA.
I many times asked them to go and talk to DFID's office in New
Delhi to support a number of their policies but they do not operate
in any major way in the four states where DFID works. Do you feel
that perhaps we need to revisit this idea of a four state emphasis
particularly where you get possible major reversals as we are
seeing in Andhra Pradesh, it is much better to work with an organisation
like SEWA working with women in delivering extremely good policies
across the whole of India rather than, if you like, working with
governments that sometimes can take strange decisions?
Dr Seymour-Smith: That is a very
valid question. Why are we in focus states at all? We believe
that a number of the changes that need to take place to reduce
poverty in India need to take place at the level of state governments
and that it is possible to enter into very productive policy dialogue
with those state governments and, in that sense, we get closer
to many of the problems of poverty and to many of the changes
that need to be made. However, we do not have an "all or
nothing" approach. As I was mentioning earlier on, setting
aside budget support, around half of our programme goes to the
four focus states and around half goes to our national programme
where we do indeed support organisations, including SEWA. There
we have a number of interesting and innovative partnerships which
do reach beyond our focus states. One example is we have recently
committed to supplying some funding to UNICEF for their Child
Environment Programme, which specifically addresses water and
sanitation issues in 14 different states in India. That happens
to include all four of our focus states but it also includes UP,
Bihar and the other states where UNICEF has a programme. It will
be directly addressing a challenged MDG on access to sanitation,
which is a particular problem in India. It will also have a significant
multiplier effect with other initiatives of ours. If you look
at primary education, for example, why do girls not complete primary
education? One of the main reasons is because there are no toilets
in the schools and therefore they are not comfortable. By putting
toilets in the schools through the SSA programme and through our
interventions with UNICEF, we are helping girls to complete their
primary education. That will have a good knock-on effect on maternal
and infant mortality rates because there is a very strong link
between girls' education and the health of mothers and babies.
We do not only support our focus states and we would not be comfortable
with that. We are always looking for new ways, through different
partnerships, to—
Q70 Mr Colman: SEWA can look to you as
well as the four state governments?
Dr Seymour-Smith: We do have dialogue
with SEWA and we do provide support to them.
Q71 Chairman: The World Bank is a big
player in India. How does DFID get on with the World Bank? Do
you think you have any influence over the World Bank? Do you have
any leverage over the World Bank? Do you think the World Bank
has any collective leadership over the government?
Dr Seymour-Smith: We have a very
close relationship with the World Bank and constant dialogue with
them. If your question is do we believe we have any influence
over the World Bank, yes, we do. We believe that we broaden and
deepen their focus on poverty reduction and they would say the
same. We work in a very complementary way alongside the World
Bank. For example, we have a trust fund which is available to
the World Bank to carry out studies and analyses to deepen the
poverty focus of the activities in which they are engaged.
Mr Clarke: We have made a special
effort to develop a partnership with the World Bank which builds
on existing commitments like the ones that Charlotte has mentioned
in India across a range of our country programmes, specifically
to find ways to work jointly on a range of activities to push
forward the harmonisation of changes. In short, we see the relationship
with the Bank as strong, positive and moving in the right direction
as a whole. We have relationships both between the HQs of the
organisations as well as at country level, so we try to link up
those country commitments at policy level with what we are trying
to do at country level.
Q72 Chairman: You have just had an external
valuation. I do not know what changes you have made as a consequence
of that but it seems DFID is rather centralised in Delhi. Given
that you are working in four states, would you like to comment
on any changes you have made in the external valuation? Why are
you so centralised?
Dr Seymour-Smith: Why are we so
centralised in Delhi and why do we not have a greater presence
in the partner states?
Q73 Chairman: Yes?
Dr Seymour-Smith: This is something
we are actively looking at at the moment. We would have to balance
the different advantages of having the critical mass of people
in Delhi or having to manage different, larger state offices,
but the logic of what I was saying earlier on about the real challenges
for many of them being located at state level would lead us to
think that it might be useful to deploy more of our staff at state
level. That may be a direction in which we choose to go in the
future.
Q74 Chris McCafferty: You said several
times that you do not have a full on approach but given that 45%
of people in India are from the scheduled castes or tribes and
they are the people suffering extreme poverty, how is DFID focusing
its activities on those most vulnerable people?
Dr Seymour-Smith: Thank you for
that question. We are acutely aware that the problems of poverty
in India will not be solved unless we pay attention to the most
marginalised and excluded: the scheduled castes and tribes, Muslim
communities who have lower social indicators than the majority
of the population, and within those groups in particular women
who suffer particular disadvantage. We have an approach paper
on social inclusion in our written evidence which you may have
been able to read which covers essentially how we are approaching
this. It has to be mainstreamed in all of our activities. We need
to measure better—and we are working on this—the impact
of our programmes on scheduled castes and tribes, minorities and
women. For example, in phase two of the reproductive and child
health programme, which we are working on with other donors, we
are working on making the criteria for measurement and monitoring
exclusively focused on those groups so that we will be able to
say how many people in those target groups have benefited.
Mrs Bagchee: Besides looking at
social inclusion across all of our programmes in education and
health, DFID also has a special programme in Orissa where the
number of tribes is quite large as a proportion of the population.
There is an Orissa tribal empowerment project which we are implementing
in partnership with IFAD. There is also a very concentrated effort
to understand their issues, to try and look at their livelihoods,
their requirements, which are slightly different from the rest
of the population. As a cross cutting theme on bringing about
social inclusion in all of the work DFID does, we have programmes
specifically targeted for scheduled tribes.
Q75 Chris McCafferty: Do you think DFID
is doing enough to help the Muslim population in India and is
DFID doing enough to help women in India? I am thinking particularly
of Muslim women.
Dr Seymour-Smith: We can never
do enough. The commitment is there but it is very hard to reach
parts of the population. We do not have activities that specifically
target the Muslim community.
Mrs Bagchee: Through UNICEF, we
will be targeting a communication programme for getting Muslim
mothers to get their children immunised. It was noticed that this
is an area where there is a tremendous amount of work remaining
to be done because there is a reluctance for Muslim children to
be immunised.
Dr Seymour-Smith: For example,
in DPEPs (District Primary Education Programs) and SSA, because
there are particular problems around the schooling of Muslim communities,
the lack of schooling facilities for Muslim children is being
addressed as part of that programme. Similarly, with reproductive
and child health, where there are specific health issues for Muslim
communities. Those will be addressed.
Mr Clarke: The issue of social
exclusion has been getting a lot more attention in our office
over the last couple of years. We do not yet have a DFID corporate
policy on this issue but we are working towards that. We have
done some work and produced papers on castes, for example, in
the past, in order that we can understand the nature of the problem
better and begin to look at the issue in the context of particular
programmes. Certainly in our DDP, our Directors' Delivery Plan
which sets out what we aim to do in Asia, we have identified that
as a major issue which needs to be looked at in all our country
programmes. There is a firm commitment to do that both at the
policy level and at the operational level. Specifically, we are
planning to look in more detail at health and education and service
delivery across a range of our country programmes with a view
to trying to highlight practical measures and operational ways
in which we can adapt and design our programmes together with
the state governments, in order to begin to tackle that problem.
I can reassure the Committee that social exclusion in all aspects
is something we attach tremendous importance to. We monitor what
our country programmes are doing to address the issue and we try
to do more research and analytical work to identify practical
measures that we can take. The work on chronic poverty will also
identify some useful insights that will help in that regard.
Q76 Chris McCafferty: Am I right that
caste and ethnicity alongside gender will be brought into your
project assessments and there will be an attempt to mainstream
those issues with the new policy? Am I understanding correctly?
Dr Seymour-Smith: That is correct.
They are already there because we already realise that, if we
are looking at service delivery, we will not reach our objectives
of getting better provision of service delivery to the poor unless
we address the issues that you have mentioned. We are trying to
strengthen our analytical framework and our understanding of what
might work, what is the tool kit that we might use, and drawing
regional lessons that Jeremy and his colleagues are helping us
to distil to say how do we reach the scheduled castes and tribes;
how do we reach the Muslim population; how do we reach women?
What is the tool kit that we can use and how can we improve what
we are doing?
Q77 Chris McCafferty: When you have the
tool kit, what kind of checks and balances are in place to assess
the impact of the policies that you may have that are pro poor
and to make sure that they are reaching the people you want them
to reach?
Dr Seymour-Smith: The main way
that we will have of measuring whether we are succeeding is measuring
whether services are reaching the poorest people. The outcomes
that we are hoping for in terms of education, that all children
should be enrolled in school and all children should complete
a primary education—the children who are not completing
schooling at the moment are, by and large, from scheduled castes
and tribes, Muslim communities and they are particularly women.
We know that is the population we are aiming for and we will know
that we have reached them if we succeed in our objectives through
SSA, for example, of getting the 23 million children in India
who are not in school at the moment into school by the end of
the period of that programme.
Q78 Chris McCafferty: What proportion
of those 23 million are Muslim?
Mrs Bagchee: It is roughly in
proportion to the general population. If you look at the log-
frames, these are all built into the monitorable indicators. For
instance, for the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan education programme,
the indicator we will be looking at is to see whether the number
of girls to boys completing the first five years of education
is getting closer or further apart. We are looking to see that
gender equity is built into the programme and similarly for the
out of school children. We need to see that the number of scheduled
caste and scheduled tribe children that are out of school have
also come into school in proportion.
Q79 Ann Clwyd: This Committee did produce
a report on the situation of women in India a few years ago and
I recollect very clearly that progressive women in a lot of areas
were being constantly threatened and abused. Yet, when we met
the India Commission on Women centrally, we were given a very
different story. On the ground, it was a very depressing story,
particularly when we heard about areas where women suffer very
greatly. I wondered if you were focusing on the position of women,
specifically in certain areas where you know they are being abused.
I do not know if that is true of poorer states or if it is equally
true in richer states.
Dr Seymour-Smith: The picture
is mixed. There are good examples of progress and good practice
and there are also clearly issues and problems. For example, the
ratio of girls to boys in some states in India is alarmingly unbalanced.
There are certainly issues of violence against women which are
pervasive in Indian society. Whether as a donor it is the best
use of our resources to try and tackle those issues directly,
I am not sure, or whether there are enough forces in Indian society
coming up to tackle those issues.
Mrs Bagchee: There is a tremendous
problem of gender inequality in India, as there is in south Asia,
but there is also a strong women's movement within the country.
As a donor agency, it is a little difficult for DFID to enjoin
very loudly in the advocacy and strengthen the hands of these
groups. What it can do, and what it is already doing, in its own
work is to ensure that the government is responsive to the fact
that its own institutions and service delivery must lead to more
gender equity. That is our effort through all of the programmes
that we support in India, in all the dialogue we have at state
level and national level, to say that you will not be able to
come up with better figures on gender equality unless the institutional
framework improves, and the way the government reaches out to
and includes women, the marginalised and so on. That is the
level, at programme level that we are concentrating on.
Q80 Ann Clwyd: Are you getting much opposition
to that line?
Mrs Bagchee: More unawareness
than opposition. It is just unawareness on the part of some of
the bureaucracy, that this bias just happens as a matter of course.
It is more difficult for women to access the primary health centres,
for instance, because the doctors are male. There are not enough
female nurses. It is those sorts of things that we will help them
to work on. In the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan, there is a female-focussed
official policy. For new teacher recruitment, it would be good
if these are female teachers because that is a big factor in getting
girls into school. To ensure that there is no institutional bias
and that the government does implement in these programmes what
it says it will do in its Planning Commission documents is where
DFID is focusing its efforts.
Dr Seymour-Smith: I would not
say we encountered opposition so much as sometimes a lack of energy
or a lack of awareness in tackling these issues.
Ann Clwyd: That can sometimes mean the
same thing.
Chairman: Thank you. As you know, practically
every Member of the Committee is due to come to India later this
year on a visit. We are splitting into two teams. Those of us
who have spent what seems quite a large chunk of our lives trying
to analyse official lines to take, we have heard the nuances concerning
AP in your comments. I think we would like a greater understanding
of this: if we hear it aright, what you are saying is that the
money DFID is spending in India is worthwhile. It purchases some
leverage but not necessarily a huge amount and although it is
a big chunk in the context of DFID's budget it is not necessarily
a huge chunk in terms of overall spending in India. One of the
things we will be interested in exploring further, I suspect,
is the tension between does DFID spend its money in specific states
and seek to purchase leverage in those states and therefore try
to communicate? We were having a discussion earlier that, rather
like a challenge fund, if you are a good performing state, you
win more money from overseas donors; or do we concentrate on women,
social excluded groups, scheduled castes, scheduled tribes and
social exclusion? What is the tension there? If we move to different
states, which states are they and what criteria? We would also
be interesting in working relationships between DFID and the Indian
government, because by then you will see how the new government
is functioning, and whether that is resulting in any changes and
otherwise the kind of questioning you have had this afternoon.
We are probably enthusiastic sceptics about DFID's spending. That
might be a fair consensus. We all recognise the scale of the problems
in India but there are still quite a lot of questions, bearing
in mind every pound we spend there. Are we expending it more effectively
in Asia or elsewhere? Thank you very much for your time. We look
forward to seeing I hope Charlotte at least in Delhi.
3 Planning Commission, GoI, 10th 5 year plan,
2002-07, Vol 3 p 104. http://planningcommission.nic.in/plans/planrel/fiveyr/welcome.html Back
4
N C Saxena, ODI Natural Resource Perspectives No 66, March
2001, p 3, http://planningcommission.nic.in/plans/planrel/fiveyr/10th/default.htm Back
5
Ev 65 Back
|
