Direction: Read the given passage carefully and answer the questions that follow. Certain words are printed in bold to help you locate them while answering some of these.
In India, as well in other developing countries, there is evidence that the effectiveness of some vast public programmes designed at the national level has been consistently undermined by serious corruption at the local level. Consequently, the intended beneficiaries fail to see benefits from programmes that draw significant amounts of government resources. A pressing policy question—particularly in an era that increasingly emphasises decentralised delivery of public services—is how to mitigate this corruption and ensure that services reach their intended targets. Improved monitoring and enforcement from higher levels of government may prove effective, but may be too costly in many circumstances, even with improved technology. Re-designing programmes to limit the incentives for corruption among those delivering the services is an ideal solution but may be politically difficult and may still leave important amounts of discretion with local agents, whether private or public. To address these issues, informal networks may be one potential solution.
National-level monitoring and enforcement can effectively discipline local authorities in certain settings. But, this is not always forthcoming or cost-effective, and implementation often requires some accountability at the local level. Simple technological solutions, coupled with strictly enforced changes in incentive structures, can overcome obstacles of cost. However, in some cases, implementing the necessary technology or enforcing the proper incentive structures may be too expensive. In these cases, finding low-cost, local-level monitoring and enforcement mechanisms becomes more pressing. Bjorkman and Svensson (2009) demonstrate that community-level disciplinary actions, encouraged by NGOs, effectively improved service delivery by public health providers in the context of Uganda. We examine how informal monitoring and enforcement mechanisms operate and what is the resulting benefit in terms of improvement in public service delivery.
In a recent study, we focus on exploring the impact of informal caste networks in the efficient delivery of India’s public distribution system (PDS). The PDS is India’s largest response to the persistence of malnutrition. The system distributes food grains and other goods through over 450,000 fair price shops, where households are entitled to purchase goods at below market rates from a locally appointed shopkeeper. The subsidy for grain is primarily targeted toward below-poverty-line (BPL) households, where BPL status is determined by local elected officials. The scale of the programme is massive—the food subsidy accounts for approximately 1.3% of India’s GDP. At the same time, leakage in the system is persistently high. Recent estimates for 2007-2008 place the fraction of grain diverted by shopkeepers and others to the black market at an astounding 43.9% across India, which is actually an improvement over previous years.
Specifically, we explore the role that caste networks can play by comparing the traditionally disadvantaged members of the Hindu caste system, Scheduled Castes (SCs), to other castes. We examine household survey data from Uttar Pradesh in 1997, the year when the targeted version of the PDS (targeted toward BPL households) called TPDS, was introduced. Under TPDS, subsidies for grain were targeted primarily to BPL households, but subsidies for sugar and kerosene were available to all households. A distinct pattern emerges in the data—SC households have higher take-up of goods when they face SC shopkeepers, but this is only the case for grain and not for sugar and kerosene. We establish that this pattern is not explained by basic socio-economic differences across the castes, and not explained by differences across villages that depend on the caste of the shopkeeper.
Our findings have a few important implications for policy design. First, there is a chance that increasing the value of the food subsidy—as envisioned in the National Food Security Bill—could actually lead to fewer households taking up goods. This is because, if monitoring is not increased sufficiently, a larger subsidy gives shopkeepers a larger incentive to black market goods. Second, expanding the number of people entitled to the PDS goods—another element of the National Food Security Bill—could create a larger swathe of people monitoring the shopkeeper and punishing illegitimate activities, and have positive effects on take-up.Source: https://www.livemint.com/Opinion/zqb9fcVLlXvFoH2przpYiJ/Role-of-informal-networks-in-public-service-delivery.html
Match the words with their synonyms:
