Public sector evaluations in India - a story over-told?

The 'International Conference on Development Evaluation' held on October 12th in Delhi seems to have been a star-studded event in that stakeholders from different institutions - UNDP, World Bank, ADB, DFID, senior IAS officers - were present to impart their views on how to build a better evaluation system for the public sector in India. The key focus seemed to be the formation of an Independent Evaluation Office (IEO), the architecture of which would be sketched out in the near future. Another important revelation seemed to be the fact that the government would spend 1% of its administrative budget (a thumb rule according to some development evaluators) - Rs 850 crores - in developing a 'fool-proof' evaluation system. As commendable as the efforts to institutionalise evaluation and generate debate may be, it still seems unclear as to how this new institution - the IEO - is going to be a change over the existing institutional setup.

As an earlier blogpost had described, the Program Evaluation Organisation (PEO) has been in existence since the 1950's as part of the Planning Commission to evaluate development schemes. So, the questions to ask would be - Has the PEO failed in its mission? Has it not been 'independent' enough? Has it not been adopting a stake-holder approach so far? These seem to be the key features higlighted as far as the new IEO goes - ie. independence and adopting a stakeholder approach. It would be interesting to see how the IEO is constructed and what this would mean for the existing structure such as the PEO, since although the existence of the PEO has been mentioned in the conference, there does not seem to be debate on why it seems to have failed in the first place.

It is worrying that instead of trying to delve into why existing mechanisms have failed or what they have failed to address, the focus seems to be on trying to create new institutions in the hope that that will solve the current problem of why programs fail to measure real impact or even outcomes. If the question of why existing structures have failed is not answered, setting up a new institution could be futile if it ends up going down the path earlier institutions such as the PEO seem to have gone. It would be interesting to see how much the new architecture of the IEO tries to deal with overcoming existing institutional failures and what it sees as the solution.