NITI Aayog: An institution to fix implementation issues: 

NITI Aayog: An institution to fix implementation issues: 

Context: NITI Aayog is responsible of monitoring and evaluating government schemes but its performance is below par

Introduction: In his last month’s radio address, Prime Minister Narendra Modi appreciated the importance of constructive criticism in strengthening democracy and the government’s performance.

Background:

• Governments in the past have devised different mechanisms to facilitate monitoring and evaluation.
• An independent evaluation office was set up under the earlier regime but wound up after this government assumed office.

Role of NITI Aayog:

• NITI Aayog is engaged in outcome-based monitoring with states in sectors such as healthcare, education, and water supply.
• It is now mooting the idea of ranking each state based on health, education, and water index, and identifying “champion states”.
• It has developed a composite water management index, comprising several key performance indicators, with different weights assigned to indicators.
• This is expected to incentivize states to collect data and analyse it to make better policies.
• The approach of measuring and monitoring progress through ranking and encouraging competition among states is akin to the approach adopted in promoting ease of doing business reforms.

Loopholes:

• Reforms remain mostly on paper with key concerns remaining unaddressed.
• Such approach might result in a race to the bottom, as legitimate beneficiaries get excluded by lowering targets.
• The vision at the top level of polity and bureaucracy is unable to percolate to the middle and entry levels, resulting in limited change on the ground.
• Impediments to implementation include capacity constraints, inadequate resources, lack of incentives to perform, no disincentives for non-performance, absence of policy and regulatory clarity among others.

Solutions:

• The government needs to realize that a business-as-usual approach will work no more, and it needs a comprehensive strategy to transform implementation.
• Such strategies much comprise working with key stakeholders to identify implementation related challenges and design solutions.
• A rigorous independent ex-ante and ex-post assessment of solutions is necessary.
• Experts suggest that significant improvement in the ability to implement policies and projects in the states, cities, and the centre can considerably add to citizens’s well-being and could even add about 2-3% to the country’s gross domestic product (GDP), without any additional resources.
• NITI Aayog will need to design customized solutions depending on the impediment.
• A policy or regulatory bottleneck could require regulatory impact assessment to identify superior regulatory alternatives
• convincing incumbents and political losers for reform could require implementation of transformation change methodology
• Customized training could be needed to deal with capacity constraints.
• There could be vertical and horizontal coordination challenges which would require NITI Aayog to act as catalyst to enhance implementation capabilities and improving outcomes, rather than merely measuring them.
• Agencies grappling with implementation should not be burdened with additional responsibilities of data collection and analysis.
• Independent agencies could be engaged to collect granular data and design different scenarios.

Conclusion:

• It is high time that NITI Aayog realizes it needs to metamorphose into an organisation which can transform implementation of policy reforms. The development monitoring and evaluation office at NITI Ayog is presently responsible for monitoring and impact evaluation of currently funded programmes. However, there are yet to witness significant improvement in this domain. Independent monitoring and evaluation is important but not sufficient to ensure the success of policy reforms.
• Identification of constraints like inadequate resources, lack of incentives to performs, no disincentives for non-performance, absence of policy and regulatory clarity etc would require NITI Aayog to have more eyes and ears on the ground. NITI Aayog could leverage available local skills for providing independent inputs and feedback
• All above strategy can help NITI Aayog to achieve its objective of transforming India.