Reply to Santosh Mehrotra's comment on ‘Evaluation of governance: a study of the Government of India's outcome budget’

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Notes

1. There is reason to believe that the MoP did not have any credible system in place to collect the requisite data on the APDRP. It is the Restructured APDRP, launched on 31 July 2008, which provides for the establishment of credible baseline data on aggregate technical and commercial (AT&C) losses. The MoP's 2010/11 outcome budget for Restructured APDRP reports that the Steering Committee has approved 1344 projects, involving an expenditure of Rs. 4859.61 crore, in 22 States for the establishment of baseline data on AT&C losses and information technology (IT) applications for energy accounting/auditing and IT-based consumer service centres (GoI 2010a, p. 20). But no information is available on what the current status is of these 1344 projects’ attempts to establish baseline data on AT&C losses. One must know what the baseline data on AT&C losses in a given area are before one can monitor the impact of Restructured APDRP on these losses in that area.

2. There is a scheme in place for evaluation of the APDRP/Restructured APDRP projects, with the MoP's 2006/07 outcome budget for ‘Funds for Evaluation of Studies’ reporting that ‘So far, 583 projects have been sanctioned since 2002–03. Independent evaluation has been got done recently in respect of 66 projects where more than 50% of the work was completed’, and that the cumulative expenditure on these evaluations from the beginning of the programme to 31 December 2005 amounted to Rs. 2.04 crore against the sanctioned cost of Rs. 28.155 crore (GoI 2006, p. 68). Have any evaluations been done in more recent years? I have seen the MoP's outcome budgets for ‘Funds for Evaluation of Studies’ for later years, but the answer to this question is not available. One also does not know the answer to the question: what is the methodology that has been used in these evaluation studies?

3. The Minister of Power, GoI, and the Secretary, MoP, GoI have agreed on a Results Framework Document for the period 1 April 2010–31 March 2011. The Results Framework Document lists ‘Reducing AT&C losses through implementation of R-APDRP scheme’ as one of the MoP's major objectives, and defines success in achieving this objective in terms of the number of projects sanctioned for the establishment of baseline data, for infrastructure strengthening and for supervisory control and data acquisition (GoI 2010b, pp. 4 and 6), and not in terms of the reduction in AT&C losses!

4. In the first phase, 62 departments have been covered under the Performance Monitoring and Evaluation System (see GoI 2011, p. 23).