To check graft, plan panel lists out measures

Mandatory social audit, empowered lokpal and lokayuktas, law to regulate regulators and separating government's policy formation and implementation duties are some of the mechanisms the UPA government wants to adopt to check corruption and development deficit.

Updated on: Aug 21, 2011, 01:40:15 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Mandatory social audit, empowered lokpal and lokayuktas, law to regulate regulators and separating government's policy formation and implementation duties are some of the mechanisms the UPA government wants to adopt to check corruption and development deficit.

In the approach paper for the 12th plan presented before Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and set of senior Cabinet ministers on Saturday, the Planning Commission said only an independent lokpal cannot tackle corruption.

“We need a slew of measures, including transparency in allocation of natural resources and accountability of regulatory mechanism,” said BK Chaturvedi, a plan panel member.

The moves come at the time when social activist Anna Hazare had launched a nationwide campaign to fight corruption through a powerful anti-corruption watchdog — lokpal.

The panel's assessment says only 60% of welfare measures reach real beneficiaries.

“Lokpal is one of the mechanisms we are suggesting and it may need a change in lokayukta laws of different states,” a senior plan panel official said.

The panel also wants the government to collaborate with the civil society in each of its popular schemes although the experiment of having a joint drafting committee on lokpal ended in bitterness.

The panel has suggested the introduction of Total Quality Management in entire programme formulation and implementation to end

"universalisation without quality syndrome".

The approach paper approved on Saturday also says that there should be a provision in popular scheme for social mobilization and recruiting professionals from the open market with strict accountability.

The panel also wants to keep the government's scheme implementation role at an arms length from its policy framing role.

“There is an inbuilt conflict of interest which promoted inefficiency,” the official said, adding that the approach paper has addressed the issue through a chapter proposing systematic reforms. The government wants to use technology, especially Unique Identification Number, to bring transparency in implementation of the government schemes and talks of providing benefits directly to people through electronic mode.

Officials said efficiency will mean a fall in government's subsidy burden from 1.6% of the GDP to 1.4% by 2017.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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