The Indian Express: Islamabad: Wednesday,
November 28, 2018.
Moreover, the website of Directorate of
Primary Education has also not updated data after 2014. The data till then only
shows the number of bonds purchased, money spent and budgetary allocation for
VLY.
The IIM-A and Unicef, which collaborated
a study on the implementation of Vidya Lakshmi Yojana (VLY) in Gujarat, has
said in its report that the government failed to provide information even under
the Right to Information (RTI) Act and therefore their research lacked in data
on some crucial aspects.
Moreover, the website of Directorate of
Primary Education has also not updated data after 2014. The data till then only
shows the number of bonds purchased, money spent and budgetary allocation for
VLY.
“Despite our best efforts, including
filing of Right to Information requests, we were not able to access this
information either at the state or at district level,” the report stated,
noting how “no information is available on the number of bonds matured and
cheques received by the bond-holders (who have fulfilled the criteria to
receive the cheque and were successfully tracked)”.
“Our limitations also point to the
necessity for the government to proactively share more data and information on
the programme and its processes publicly,” the IIM-A research noted.
Prof Ankur Sarin of the IIM-A research
team said, “Apart from absence of prior studies, lack of access to adequate
data and resources to collect large scale primary data, the information gaps
among the beneficiaries is one of the major areas where the government has
failed to work upon.”
The researchers also found that
government reports like the 2014 report of the CAG, annual reports by Gujarat
Finance Department, and socio-economic review differ on the budgets for the
VLY.
“While the data is consistent across most
years, there are some inconsistencies that need clarifications. This is true
especially in 2003-04 where all three differ by a large factor. In 2002-03, the
provision as per the CAG report and Gujarat Education Department website was Rs
10 crore while the finance department report suggests it was Rs 3 crore. For
2003-04, all three documents have mentioned different provisions Rs 15 crore
according to Education Department website, Rs 10 crore according to Finance
Department report and Rs 20 crore according to the CAG report. Similar
differences are found in the number of bonds purchased and proposed number of
beneficiaries as well. Consequently, the public financing of the program
remains unclear,” added Karan Singhal, co-researcher at IIM-A.
“Our findings from the field coupled with
existing information available through secondary sources particularly CAG
report of 2014 that highlighted financial and governance related irregularities
indicate that the need to continue this scheme in its current form must be
re-evaluated,” the report stated.
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