Between June and August every year my colleagues and I buckle down to implement our annual expenditure tracking survey?PAISA district survey. Some months ago I wrote, in this column, about the difficulties of tracking expenditures in government-run social welfare programmes. The PAISA district surveys are designed to address this problem in the elementary education sector. Every year, we survey schools to find out what monies reach them, when they reach and how they are spent. In 2011, we tracked Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) funds, in 2012 we tracked the mid-day meal scheme. This year we are back to tracking SSA funds.
Surveys usually make headlines based on the data they generate. But, the process of conducting the survey itself shores up a gold mine of ?data? on how the government actually functions?one that is often forgotten in the rush to analyse the data. Lest we forget, here are some interesting snippets from the field, based on our previous school surveys, each of which tells an important story about the health of our government elementary schools.
Between the enrolment season, marriage season, election season, there?s always a reason for students and teachers to skip school: India has amongst the highest teacher and student absenteeism rates in the world. This can be a real challenge if your survey depends on teachers being present in schools?the headmaster is the primary respondent for the PAISA survey. And as we struggled to find the appropriate window to conduct the survey, we unearthed some of the reasons why absenteeism is so high.
First, teachers are often given tasks that ?legitimise? their absence from schools. Back in 2011, when we first started, we scheduled our surveys for April?the start of the academic year in most states. We soon discovered that the first two weeks of the academic year is usually devoted to meeting enrolment targets. Since teachers are monitored on enrolment targets and not on actually teaching, most teachers spend the first few weeks outside of the classroom filling up forms to showcase their efforts at meeting these targets to the local administration. No teachers means no students and so the schools are effectively closed. Keeping this in mind, we postponed our future surveys to July. But this year we encountered another problem?elections! Andhra Pradesh (where we launched our 2013 survey) is conducting its Panchayat elections and many teachers are away on election duty?another ?legitimate? reason to be away from schools.
Second, the annual academic calendars bear little connection with local seasons and cultures?resulting in large chunks of the year where teachers and students do not show up. You can?t survey schools in Rajasthan in May because its wedding season, you can?t survey schools in Madhya Pradesh in September because its harvest season ? the list goes on. It may be more reasonable to map school holidays with local practices. Interestingly, these calendars are prepared at the district level. Despite this the mismatch between local conditions and school calendars seems to be a widespread problem.
Schools rarely open on time: back in the day, when I was a school-going kid, I spent many a morning running around the football field as punishment for showing up late. Turns out rural school-going children in India don?t have that problem because schools rarely open on time. In 2011, we found that Bihar had set school timing between 6.30 am and 11.30 am. But, as our surveyors discovered, 6.30 am was far too early for teachers and schools usually opened somewhere between 7.30 am and 8 am. In fact, 6.30 am is unreasonably early, you could argue but our experience in Madhya Pradesh showed that teacher?s punctuality (or lack thereof) has little to do with school timings. In Madhya Pradesh, schools officially start at a reasonable 10.30 am. But in many instances, surveyors reached schools at 11.30 am, to find children playing in the fields waiting for their teacher to show up! Anecdotes suggest that in practice, school timings depend on the distance teachers have to travel to get to schools?making, to my mind, a strong case for local recruitment of teachers.
Beware, your headmaster may be under trial for murder: true to stereotype, my colleagues in Bihar faced a unique problem?surveyors could not access financial documents in some schools because headmasters were under trial for murder and their accounts were frozen! And in more mundane settings it wasn?t murders but inadequate financial training, and administrative bungling like loss of records when teachers are transferred that led to gaps in financial records in schools, making it difficult to accurately track money flows and expenditures.
Government officials need their very own right to information: The information asymmetry between government and citizens is well known. What is relatively less known is how wide information gaps within the government can be, particularly between the decision makers and implementers. During our surveys, we discovered that headmasters, who are tasked with managing school accounts, have no formal access to critical financial information like their annual school budget and when they could expect money to be transferred to their accounts. In fact, many headmasters said that they find out about fund transfers when they make bank visits. Worse, information on purpose of monies transferred can take longer to travel to headmasters than actually transferring the money. The result?monies often lie unused in bank accounts till the messages from the top are received.
But amidst all the chaos and confusion, there is also much to celebrate. The very fact that we are able to conduct these surveys without any hiccups?there are only a few stray incidents where surveyors have been denied access to financial records or threatened?is a tribute to our democracy and the fact that our right to information is upheld. And there are many schools that work despite the chaos. During field work we encountered many schools where well meaning headmasters dipped in to their savings to make sure schools run even if money doesn?t arrive on time, we?ve met parent committee members who took to the streets to ensure that the officials disciplined their teachers and teachers, who?ve beaten the odds to show up in schools and actually teach. How do we take these isolated experiences and scale them up across the country? How do we ensure that every parent and every teacher feels a sense of ownership toward their school? How do we build a supportive administrative environment, one that motivates and supports teachers, parents and students? This is the challenge of the future.
The author is director, Accountability Initiative, and senior research fellow, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi
