Clearer math soon for states' social scheme budgets

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

target-based budgeting in their social schemes, a move aimed at ensuring better impact on the ground and greater accountability of public money spent on welfare measures. The Development, Monitoring and Evaluation Office (DMEO), an attached office of Niti Aayog, is developing states' specific output-outcome monitoring framework (OOMF) and providing technical support to each state to implement the framework. This will improve the quality of expenditure and bring in greater transparency and accountability in state budgeting, a senior government official told ET.

«The framework will help states to monitor the physical and financial progress of schemes at district, block and village levels and may eventually lead to result-based financing,» the official quoted above said. OOMF is expected to help states rationalise centrally-sponsored schemes, state development plan schemes and help track institutions under various state departments based on their performance outputs. The states' framework will be developed on the lines of the central framework, which has been used since 2017-18 for drafting the union budget.

According to people familiar with the development, DMEO is at different stages of discussions with over a dozen states to roll out the OOMF. These states include Gujarat, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Haryana, Karnataka, Uttarakhand, Assam, and the union territory of Delhi. Under the state-specific framework, targets will be set on output, measured as a product of programme activities, and outcome, which will be collective results or qualitative improvements brought about by the delivery of services.