ASPIRATIONAL DISTRICT PROGRAMME
1.Context
On January 7, during the Second National Conference of Chief Secretaries, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the Aspirational Blocks Programme (ABP).
This transformational programme focuses on improving governance to enhance the quality of life of citizens in the most difficult and underdeveloped blocks of India by converging existing schemes, defining outcomes, and monitoring them on a constant basis
2.About Aspirational District Programme (ADP)
- The Aspirational Districts Programme (ADP) is one of the largest experiments on outcomes-focused governance in the world
- Spread across 112 of India’s socio-economically challenged districts, the ADP is Niti Aayog’s flagship initiative to improve health, nutrition, education, and economic outcomes.
- Initial evidence suggests that the ADP has already contributed towards improving lakhs of lives
- The ADP theory rests on three pillars: Competition, Governance, and collaboration
- Competition provides accountability on district governments for final outcomes using high quality data
- Convergence effectively brings together horizontal and vertical tiers of the government
- Collaboration enables impactful partnership between government and philonthraophy and civil society
- Of the aspirational districts, NITI Aayog plays mentoring role in 27 districts in eight states which is hoe to 60 million people
- Twelve central government ministries similarly adopted the remaining districts
3.Outcomes of ADP
Health outcomes in the mentored districts reveal significant improvements between the first and second third-party household surveys (in June-August 2018 and January-March 2019).
There is a significant increase in registering pregnant women into the health system (from 73 per cent to 86 per cent), institutional delivery of babies (66 per cent to 74 per cent), and anti-diarrheal treatment via ORS (51 per cent to 67 per cent) and zinc (34 per cent to 53 per cent)
4.Analysis on the results
While a deeper mixed-methods analysis is required to clearly understand what explains these results, we hypothesise the following four factors play a role
- One, pioneering state and district-level initiatives in both the ADP and non-ADP districts in areas prioritised under the programme
- Two, spurred by competition on outcomes, local governments target their efforts and improve programme implementation and design.
- Three, the focus on outcomes enables local experimentation based on a firm appreciation of ground realities
- Four, partnerships between various philanthropic and civil society organisations with district governments augment local capacity.
- High quality administrative data is critical to improve programme implementation and design at the local level
- The poor quality of administrative data is usually due to capacity issues at the ground level as well as incentives to inflate performance.
- To help improve data quality, we use independent surveys to validate administrative data
- Building each district’s internal capacity to produce reliable and actionable data, and promoting a culture of data use, can be made a priority for the ADP
- ADP is a laboratory of various cutting-edge governance reforms. First and foremost, the programme has shifted focus away from inputs and budgets to outcomes, such as learning and malnutrition, at the highest echelons of the government
- It has also introduced non-financial incentives to encourage government officials to deliver results and actively encourages forging partnerships with philanthropies and civil society to create better impact using the same amount of budgetary spends
- The programme has also developed a lean data infrastructure that smartly exploits complementary strengths of administrative and survey data.
Source:indianexpress
