Poverty Monitoring and Statistical Strengthening II The India Country Assistance Strategy for FY05-08 aims to support comprehensive reforms in selected reforming states. In addition, in view of the widening gulf in poverty and social indicators between reforming and non-reforming states, the Bank will also attempt to engage with the poorest states, especially those with large numbers of poor. A key principle of the engagement consists of a focus on outcomes: the Bank seeks to support or develop a stronger focus on results, emphasizing monitoring and evaluation within the programs of Government of India (GoI) and the states. The Bank has been providing assistance to states for strengthening their poverty monitoring and statistical systems to better allow them to monitor development progress in general, and poverty reduction in particular. The first phase of such efforts, supported through the Poverty Monitoring and Analytic Support for India task (recently closed in June 2004), provided technical assistance and analytical work at two levels – to reforming states, and to the central government. This is the second phase including the following four main components: (i) technical assistance on poverty monitoring and statistical strengthening to state governments; (ii) assistance to GoI Ministry of Statistics on implementation of recommendations of the NSC; (iii) building capacity and demand for evaluations; and (iv) promoting learning across states through wider dissemination and cross-state learning workshops. As in the past, the task consists of a mix of technical assistance and analytical work. Details are provided below. 
Uttar Pradesh Uttar Pradesh has a Poverty and Social Monitoring System (PSMS) which was set up to monitor overall progress at reducing poverty and improving key gender and social indicators in the state. The main instrument used in the PSMS for monitoring progress is a special poverty module that is added to the state sample of the annual NSS consumer expenditure survey. The Bank has provided advice on the design of the survey, as well technical assistance to improve timeliness and quality of data collection efforts. The first poverty module was canvassed in 1999-00. The poverty module has been repeated in two subsequent rounds but the data are yet to be analyzed. GoUP has requested assistance from the Bank to prepare a follow-up report to the earlier UP Baseline report in order to assess changes in living conditions since 1999-00. The analysis would cover a number of areas, including regional disparities, progress in income and non-income (social) indicators of well-being, and benefit incidence of public programs. Apart from the intrinsic value of such an assessment, close collaboration during the data analysis process between Departments of Economics and Statistics (DES) and Bank staff would also provide further opportunity to strengthen data analysis skills amongst DES staff.
Karnataka In Karnataka, a Poverty and Human Development Monitoring System (PHDMS) has been set up in the Planning Department. The monitoring system comprises quarterly bulletins on wages and prices, an annual survey of poverty and human development outcomes, and a comprehensive Human Development Report (HDR) every few years. The Bank has provided assistance in a number of areas, focused on improving timeliness and accuracy of data collection, improving data dissemination, and building the blocks of a comprehensive monitoring system. For the coming year, GoK has requested assistance in a number of areas: (i) hands-on training to improve data analysis skills of staff in the PHDMS; (ii) development of web-based system to disseminate data and analytical findings in the local language; (iii) analytical inputs for the second HDR; and (iv) development of a tool to monitor the state of public facilities at the district-level. The facility monitoring tool is a new initiative that aims to monitor progress in each district, as well as to prepare district report-cards that could potentially spur competition across districts and lead to improvements in service delivery. A first survey of primary schools and primary health care centers has recently been completed and data analysis is underway. If deemed useful, regular monitoring would be taken up under the PHDMS, and would be extended to monitor other public facilities such as aanganwadi centers and PDS shops.
Orissa In Orissa, based on guidance provided by the government Poverty Reduction Task Force, the work thus far has concentrated on strengthening statistical capacity in DES. While the majority of economic and poverty-related data is collected by DES, its timeliness was seriously compromised by centralized data entry and lack of requisite in-house skills for processing data. The Bank has been providing assistance to streamline data collection and processing, by developing systems for decentralized data entry, and training DES officers in basic computer skills, data processing and management. Continuing support for these initiatives will be one of the main activities for the coming fiscal year. Work is presently underway in DES to prepare district-level poverty estimates as well as to develop a comprehensive baseline of poverty and human development indicators for the state, mainly with the support of local researchers and consultants. To strengthen data analysis skills within government, as in Karnataka and UP, hands-on training will be provided to DES staff. In addition, the Bank will work with GoO to complete the on-going Vulnerability Assessment which seeks to identify key vulnerable groups, their sources of vulnerability, and strategies to cope with shocks. Data collection for the study was completed in June 2004; data analysis is currently being carried out, and the report is expected to be completed in the Fall 2004.
Other States In other states, discussions with government are underway to identify priority areas where the Bank can usefully contribute. In Andhra Pradesh, the Bank has been supporting the work of the Poverty and Social Analysis Monitoring Unit (PSAMU) which is responsible for monitoring poverty and social indicators. However, the Unit has been unable to fulfill its originally envisaged function of becoming an advisory body to GoAP policy-makers - partly due to lack of technical capacity of PSAMU staff and partly due its existence outside the government, in the Society for Elimination of Rural Poverty. To sustain our engagement in this area, two immediate steps will be to first, confirm that the recently elected new government in AP will continue the interest of the previous government in poverty monitoring, and second, building on the lesson of the last two years and from other states, will be to explore ways of better integrating the functions of PSAMU into the Planning Department. In Tamil Nadu, initial discussions with the government have focused on identifying potential areas of collaboration, on both monitoring and evaluation activities. A recent workshop attended by members of government, academic institutions, and key representatives from planning and monitoring units of other states endorsed initial steps for strengthening monitoring activities, including stock-taking and reconciliation of existing information on poverty and social indicators, streamlining data systems, and identifying areas in which data collection needs to be either initiated or improved. Further discussion of this agenda is expected to take place in the coming months, which will determine how the Bank’s engagement in Tamil Nadu takes shape.
Central Government In its report published in 2002, the National Statistics Commission (NSC) identified a number of deficiencies in the national statistical system and made recommendations for its reform. GoI subsequently appointed the Ministry of Statistics and Program Implementation as the main agency to coordinate the implementation of the NSC's recommendations. Last year, the Bank team provided technical assistance to MoS to help prepare terms of reference for various studies to be carried out under a $1.6 million project to strengthen the country's statistical system. This project, which is being financed from the Technical Assistance for Economic Reforms project and is expected to be carried out in 2004-05, comprises several exploratory studies and pilots, including (i) a study to identify the specific requirements to strengthen state DESs, (ii) a study for the establishment of an All-India statistical network, (iii) a study for the creation and maintenance of a Business Register, and (iv) pilot surveys for the improvement of service sector statistics. The TA provided through the poverty monitoring and statistical strengthening task last year was very well-received by the MoS team, which has requested that this be continued throughout the project implementation period. The findings of the studies carried out under the ongoing project are expected to help lay the groundwork for a subsequent (and possibly considerably more ambitious) India statistical strengthening project (ISSP). As the findings from these studies become available over the course of the year, the Bank team will help provide technical assistance to the MoS team to discuss and analyze these findings, decide on the future course of action, and accordingly develop detailed and fully-costed implementation plans for subsequent activities. Many of these activities are expected to then be carried out under the subsequent statistical strengthening investment project.
Building Capacity and Demand for Evaluations To complement the poverty monitoring work, renewed emphasis will be placed on building capacity and demand for evaluations at the state-level. At any given point in time, many policy and institutional experiments are being undertaken by different state governments. Rigorous assessments of these experiments is needed to build our knowledge base of what works, and what works less well. However, as brought out in the Tamil Nadu workshop on poverty monitoring and evaluation, even when there is demand for evaluations, governments are constrained by inadequate technical capacity, within and outside government, to carry out credible evaluations. Under the first phase of the poverty monitoring and statistical strengthening task, the Bank has been providing support for the Independent Evaluation Initiative in Karnataka. This initiative, led by the Department of Planning, aims to sensitize staff in line departments on the need for evaluations, the principles underlying impact and process evaluations, and the need to distinguish between monitoring and evaluation. Evaluation studies are contracted out to local institutes, who have also been provided some training on evaluation methods. A recent assessment of the initiative points to difficulties but also progress. The difficulties are of two sorts: evaluation reports are of variable, and often, poor quality, and even when reports are credible, there is inadequate follow-up by line departments. At the same time, the assessment also notes that there is growing appreciation of the need and usefulness of good evaluations, and highlights that in select cases, the evaluation studies have resulted in changes in program design – a small but significant achievement for the program. Under the second phase, the Bank will continue to assist GoK in this area, and will explore the extent to which a similar initiative can be carried out by other state governments. In Karnataka, although some training on methods will be provided as and when requested by the government, the primary focus will be on promoting the use of evaluations by concerned departments. Discussions have been held with the government of Tamil Nadu, where training in data analysis and evaluation methods for officials in the Directorate of Evaluation and Applied Research has been identified as a potential avenue for strengthening GoTN’s capacity in evaluation. In addition to providing on-demand technical assistance, the task will also support more substantive analysis in collaboration with Indian researchers, arising out of our dialogue with state governments and past analytical work. One such area, relevant across states, is the effectiveness of public spending in the education and health sectors. Public spending can play an important role in improving educational and health outcomes. Yet, the empirical evidence on whether public expenditure in these sectors has been effective is mixed, and a recent survey carried out by the Bank (see State Fiscal Reforms in India: Progress and Prospects, World Bank, 2004) has revealed the need for more work in this area. To fill this gap, a study to examine the links between public spending (and the availability of public facilities) and human development outcomes across states using data from the late nineties is proposed in collaboration with Prof. Jyotsna Jalan of the Indian Statistical Institute. These links will be assessed at the national level as well as at a more disaggregated level for certain areas/states (like Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan) and social groups (like the scheduled caste, scheduled tribe). This task falls under the heading of both promoting evaluation, and learning across states, as a key focus of the work is on differences in performance across states. The study, as well as providing useful material for major Bank reports, such as the Development Policy Review, will also feed into the "promoting learning across states" objective of the next section, as it can be discussed and disseminated through these workshops.
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