Times
of India: New Delhi: Wednesday, 24 June 2015.
The
government seems very wary of foreign funding for NGOs, but its own health
ministry has hundreds of consultants, a large number of them on the pay of
external aid agencies. Replying to an RTI application, the health ministry said
363 consultants worked with it.
The salaries
of a large number of these consultants are being paid by external aid agencies
such as the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the UK's
Department for International Development (DFID) and the United Nations
Population Fund (UNFPA). These organizations hire consultants and pay them
through agencies such as Deloitte, a US-based financial company, IPE Global,
which describes itself as a development consultancy, or SPC Management, a
consulting company. Health-related international agencies such as UNICEF and
the WHO too have consultants in the ministry.
Former health
secretaries and senior public health experts admitted that having a large
number of external consultants has become the practice in recent years. Many of
them added that this not only raised serious issues of conflict of interest,
security and sovereignty, but also led to the erosion of in-house technical
expertise, making the government permanently dependent on external consultants.
There was no response from the ministry to questions TOI mailed to them on the
issue.
Many former
health ministry bureaucrats TOI spoke to pointed out that with the launch of
several schemes such as National Health Mission and Reproductive and Child
Health, the workload in the ministry had increased exponentially but no posts
were being sanctioned. "This has made us dependent on the consultants given
by aid agencies. Without these consultants, ministry work will probably come to
a grinding halt," said a retired bureaucrat.
Reetika
Khera, associate professor of economics in IIT-Delhi, said, "The
consultants are in effect employees of various consulting firms like Deloitte,
which is essentially a financial company whose consulting pages include life
sciences and healthcare as an industry, raising clear conflict of interest
issues."
"For a
country with aspirations of being a great power to be dependent on DFID and
USAID for the regular running of a national ministry is absolutely
shameful," said a person who worked with the ministry for over a decade on
public health policy.
"The
ministry has 15 apex public health institutions through whom it could hire consultants,
thus strengthening its own technical capabilities and the institutions
concerned. External consultants leave when funding dries up and all the
institutional memory of the division or issue he or she was working upon is
lost," explained a former ministry consultant.
"A
consultant paid by an agency has dual loyalties and when asked to work on
guidelines or policy, being more loyal to his paymaster, is bound to check with
the agency. The agency will then insert whatever it wants into the guidelines,"
a person who has worked with the ministry and multilateral organisations on
health legislation explained.
He cited the
example of how the technical secretariat for the national immunisation
programme was shifted out of the ministry into the Public Health Foundation of
India (PHFI), which received $100 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation, whose avowed goal is to influence government policy on health
programmes such as immunisation.
Many of those
TOI spoke to felt that bureaucrats were reluctant to do away with the system of
consultants, though such recommendations have been made many times, because
they liked to keep foreign aid agencies happy. Many looked forward to
deputation abroad or the frequent foreign jaunts these agencies could swing,
they pointed out.
.JPG)
.JPG)
