Transparency in Government

The government institutions involved in development activities/ public services in Nepal are often perceived to be lacking in transparency in their activities and contributing towards corruption and malpractices. This is believed to have become a hurdle in enhancing the efficiency of resource utilisation.

Lack of transparency is partly due to the absence of an incentive or self-reinforcing structure in the organisation system - institutions do not have a structure or system that would encourage the respective institutions to be transparent or minimise the possibility of corruption. Although there are systems established for financial and management audits, their results and effectiveness are not self-evident.

Transparency International Nepal has taken the initiative to develop a self-enforcing mechanism by creating Transparency Index for the key ministries/ institutions that will push these institutions to be more transparent and accountable.

Public evaluation of an institution’s performance by measuring their transparency level is believed to reinforce the urgency, and likewise, improve their accountability thereby helping in achieving the goal of good governance. This will further enhance the confidence level amongst the general public towards the performance of the concerned organisation.

In order to fulfil these objectives of TI Nepal and ACNielsen Nepal carried out a study, in cooperation with ‘Centre for Policy, Practices Dialogue’ (CPPD), on transparency levels in select government ministries.

The key objective of the study carried out in June-July 2004 was to design and develop transparency indices with the help of which, the transparency level in ministries and departments can be assessed and monitored over time. At the same time, the study also diagnosed the areas where corruption is widely eminent.

Research Design

The survey addressed two critical areas through its design and operation; hence the survey was conducted in two phases. The initial phase comprised secondary research of existing documents, reports, published articles on corruption in different print media that were collected from various sources; to get an idea of the current scenario in a better manner. Information was also gathered on existing policies, guidelines and practices followed by different institutions to maintain transparency and accountability in their organisation.

The research partners subsequently identified those ministries/departments, where corruption was distinct. Further, since these transparency indicators ought to be applicable for any government institution (for comparison purposes) an effort was made to identify the commonalties of each sector so that a consistent format could be developed.

During the second phase of the study two distinct surveys were conducted. The first one addressed officials, bureaucrats and political leaders associated with the short-listed ministries and departments. This component was driven by qualitative in-depth interviews focussing on generic and specific transparency issues.

The objective of the qualitative in-depth interviews, conducted by CPPD, was to identify and define key dimensions of planning, budgeting, funds allocations and functioning and the grey-areas/loopholes thereof that might lead to scope for lack of transparency - so that the institution may benefit from periodic feedback in reducing/preventing non-transparent state of affairs.

The second survey component comprised a representative quantitative survey that was conducted among the general public, through randomly sampled household contacts. This survey adopted multi-stage sampling and followed standard formats of ward sampling, random selection of starting points and interviewing the household head.

Under the quantitative survey, each ministry was rated on several attributes relating to transparency and overall services. General public (household heads) rated local establishments (health post/hospital, school, forest department, etc) on the basis of their exposure to specific institutions/functionaries, in order to discard any blind biases. Hence, only those people who had prior exposure to a ministry/department were allowed to rate that institution.

A series of multivariate analyses were then conducted to identify influence loading of each attribute on the overall transparency level of a ministry. Thereafter mean scores of individual attributes (scale 1 - 3) of that ministry were used to calculate a 'weighted average mean score' of overall transparency (scale 1 - 3). This weighted mean score of overall transparency was scaled to obtain final transparency score ranging from 1 to 100, and was referred to as 'community perception indices'.

The evaluation data of CPPD team was used for calculating the transparency indices for 'policy and practices' of each ministry. Here again, each institution was rated on a scale of 3 against stipulated transparency attributes. This rating was based on the information disclosed by ministry officials as well as keeping in account their experience in course of their long stint at secretarial levels. In this scale, 3 implied 'satisfactorily transparent', 2 implied 'semi-transparent' and 1 implied 'less transparent'.

The individual attribute rating scores (scale 1 - 3) for a ministry were averaged (arithmetic mean) to arrive at a mean score of overall transparency (scale 1 - 3). Similar to the process of working community survey indices, this mean score of overall transparency was scaled to obtain final transparency indices ranging through 1 to 100. This was the 'policy-practices indices'.

The final step was to calculate the overall 'composite index' for each ministry by combining the two indices namely: 'community perception indices' and 'policy-practices indices'. This 'composite index' was calculated as weighted average of the earlier two indices wherein the 'community perception index' was assigned a weight of 80 per cent and the 'policy-practices index' was given a weight of 20 per cent.

The scaling formula used was: 50.5 + [(Mean Score - 2) X 49.5]. The data output was subsequently analysed, both qualitatively and quantitatively. The analyses aimed to arrive at assessments as well as cause-impact linkages.

Transparency Indices based on Community Survey

# The most common channel through which the people got to know and firmed perception about the government institutions in the country was friends and relatives (90 per cent), followed by mass media viz. radio/television (50 per cent). Other sources were government staff, newspapers, pamphlets, booklets, camps, fetes and exhibition that were mentioned to a lower extent.

# 'Water Resources' and 'Forestry' were relatively high on transparency whereas 'Labour and Transport', 'Land Administration', 'MLD' and 'Home Affairs' were low on this measure.

# Overall the policy and practices relating to transparency in the ministries were evaluated to be between the 'low' to the 'moderate' range with a large majority of the ministries scoring less than the middle score level of 50.

# Finance ministry is a typical case where its 'Customs' department is among the lowest on transparency whereas its 'Banking' sector gets one of the highest scores. The low index score of 'Customs' and average score of 'Tax', pulled down the overall score of the Finance Ministry.

# Mostly, irregularities were perceived to be occurring due to misuse of the budget expenses and in service delivery. Irregularities in procurement and taking illegal fees were also mentioned by the population.

# When asked about overall service satisfaction, people who were satisfied cited overall good services and promptness as key reasons leading to satisfaction. On the other hand, people who expressed dissatisfaction with overall services mentioned lack of good services, not getting free services where due and being harassed by staff, their behaviour and carelessness/lack of initiative.

# People who were satisfied with the government institutions conveyed that the main driving factor was being aware of all developments and activities going on or offered by the institutions.

# Similarly, people who were dissatisfied with the transparency level maintained in government institutions mentioned reasons such as: information and facts not being clearly and timely informed to the public. Moreover public are not always aware of the various activities/developments taking place within the institution. People also conveyed that they are not aware of the project budgets and there seemed to be lack of supervision from the higher level, which led to lack of transparency.

Transparency Indices based on Policy and Practices evaluation

# Overall the policy and practices relating to transparency in the ministries were evaluated to be between 'low' to 'moderate' range with a large majority of the ministries scoring less than the middle score level of 50.

# The ministries which are relatively better placed on transparency were 'Forestry', 'Women, Children & Social Welfare' and 'Local Development'.

# The ministries which were evaluated to be at particularly low level of transparency were 'Labour and Transport Management', 'Physical Planning and Works', 'Home' and Agriculture and Cooperatives'.

Some of the most common weaknesses with respect to transparency in policy and practices in government ministries were cited by the respondents as:

# General public are not asked on the matters of fixation of service charges and additions and elimination of any services or office. Extent of participation and involvement of employees in the decision making process is inadequate. Hence it is better to put such matters of common impact in the public domain for apposite debate.

# There is very little transparency in the process of transfer, promotion and training to the ministry staff.

# Sometimes the ministry is not able to cope with the demand for services by the people due to poor human resource management and lack of facilities and finance.

# The ministries may have a good system of delegation of authority and decentralisation of work and accountability; however, clarity on recording and reporting system is inadequate.

# The ministries provide services to the general people up to the VDC, Ward and Community level but the extent and quality of such services is not adequate and to the satisfactory of the general mass.

# Communication and feedback systems with the employees and the beneficiaries on different stages of service delivery have been lacking. Implementation mechanism is satisfactory but monitoring system needs further improvement.

Consolidated Transparency Indices of Ministries

The indices of community survey and policy-practices evaluation by experts were combined to form a single overall consolidated index for each ministry. As discussed earlier, the consolidated index was computed by assigned weighting of community survey index and policy-practices evaluation index (refer Chart).

Overall the composite indices were close to the community survey indices since the weightage assigned to this score was high at 80 per cent. However it is important to note from the chart below that a high degree of correlation existed between the 'community indices' and 'policy-practices indices' for almost all ministries, baring a few like 'Physical Planning and Works', and the relative trends between the ministries were very similar.

(Sameer Shukla, Country Manager - ACNielsen Nepal)

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