Transforming Public Service Delivery in Rural India

Earth Observation has been a true game-changer in ensuring that government schemes and public services reach villages optimally, and are constantly tracked and monitored. By Stutee Gupta and Dr. KM Reddy

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, with its ambitious 17 goals and 169 targets, aims to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure prosperity for all. However, the success of these goals and targets would depend on developing the rural areas where most of the world's poor live.

More resources would need to be allocated for investment in rural areas, not just because that is where most of the poor live but also because these areas have a great potential for economic development (SOFA 2017). The rural population worldwide is vulnerable to livelihood shocks and climate variability.

A wide range of public service delivery schemes (PSDS), almost 70% worldwide (World Bank 2020), aim at ensuring social security to over 2.5 billion rural people representing 56% of the poorest quintile globally (Ivaschenko et al., 2018).

In developed countries, services are delivered by coordinated efforts of various institutions and programs, including social insurance, social assistance, and employment protection and promotion.

Whereas, in developing countries, it happens directly through strengthening the livelihood resource base of the underprivileged and marginalized communities. It also relies significantly on income transfers, improved access to essential services and/ or efficacious job markets, and the creation of durable assets (Barrientos and Hulme, 2009).

Conventionally, all public service delivery has followed a typical linear hierarchical model in which outputs from one stage form a direct input to the next stage and vice versa. The mismatch in input/ output needs among the different levels lead to suboptimal realization of goals since the optimum of the whole chain may be different from the optimum of each stage, thus lacking coherence.

Other issues have been the need for more data and data asymmetries caused due to manual record-keeping and a non-standardized process, citing arduous operating terrain, the scale of coverage, multiple languages, and low literacy rates as the main reasons.

Overall, this led to opaqueness at the lower levels and a lack of accountability at higher levels. Subsequently, adopting Information and Communication Technology and Management Information systems led to trans- parency due to digitization.

However, it failed to account for double booking, i.e., counting the same asset under two or more schemes, or the ghost assets that don’t exist on the ground but are on papers/records. Monitoring the pace of the work, and its current state on the ground, also proved to be difficult.

Overall effectiveness of ICT-based solutions has been limited mainly to inventory management, i.e., counting the works, tracking the allocation, and disbursement of funds.

Remote sensing and satellite data has been of immense value in overcoming the constraints associated with traditional ICT solutions, providing effective solutions.

Utility of EO

An unprecedented array of Earth Observation data capable of depicting the footprints of human activities at various scales has been a boon in solving the complex issues bothering decision-makers and planners. It also helped advance the understanding of ecological processes and the changing composition of the Earth's biosphere at scales from local plots to the whole planet.

The very high-resolution (VHR) satellite imageries (less than 1 m spatial resolution) have enhanced the ability to precisely detect and identify the ground features, broadening their utility in various domains. It has led to substantial improvement in the public services delivery chains, which supports the creation of rural infrastructure such as roads, houses, animal sheds, soil, and water conservation structures-farm ponds, check dams, contour trenches, contour bunds farm forests/plantations to name a few.

With their dedicated outlay, these schemes are implemented either independently or in convergence with MGNREGA for payment of wages which is the latter's primary mandate.

In India, leapfrog transformation has been witnessed in almost all major schemes (Table 1) by adopting EO data as the basis of monitoring and evaluation at various levels leading to enhanced transparency and accountability. Table 2 presents the comparative account of the different PSDC models as they evolved.

Some of the salient features of EO-augmented PSDC that have revolutionized the entire services chain are summarized as follows:

1. Asset management system: Geotagging of assets created under various schemes using a mobile app with multiple attributes and confirming their physical existence in the backdrop of high-resolution earth observation satellite data have helped overcome the issues of ghost assets. It has also helped overcome double booking issues due to convergence with schemes, thus transforming these service deliveries from mere asset inventory to a more robust asset management system.

2. Before, During, and After

Monitoring: With the adoption of satellite data and geotagging tools, progress-based fund disbursement is introduced in the PSDS. Satellite images provide evidence for stages of work execution subject to the availability of the satellite pass over the particular location, as captured through the geotagged field photograph leaving little or no room for malpractice.

3. Targeted Performance Monitoring: Spatially explicitness offered by satellite images facilitates a timebound reporting system that mandates geotagging of an asset within a stipulated time. Such a Mechanism helps monitoring the performance at various administrative levels so that issues, if any, are reported and resolved efficiently.

4. Rich Asset Bank: Data is a new fuel for development. The vast amount of geotagged

Centrally Sponsored Schemes Service Offering

Pradhan Mantri Grameen Aavas Yojna (PMGAY)

Pradhan Mantri Grameen Sadak Yojna (PMGSY)

Rashtriya Krsihi Vikas Yojna (RKVY)

Housing for All

Rural Roads Connectivity

Agriculture Infrastructure

Swatch Bharat Abhiyan - Grameen Sanitation/ Household Toilets

Per Drop More Crop ( PDMC) Micro-irrigation Infrastructure

Integrated Watershed Management (IWMP); Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchai Yojana (PMKSY)

Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA)

Watershed Development

Rural Livelihood - Guaranteed Wages to the Marginal Farmers

Table 2: Public Service Delivery Models – Comparison of Major Features

grievances redressal, etc., with a piece of valid evidence.

7. Cost-effectiveness: EO satellite data capture the most realistic insights of even the remotest places. Once the data is acquired, anyone can virtually visit any location anywhere on the ground multiple times, thus reducing the overall costs of project monitoring most objectively and modestly.

Open data philosophy: Given the recent policy reforms and geospatial data ecosystem, EO-based offering opens the pathways for open government data, i.e., complete, primary, timely, accessible, machine processable, non-discriminatory, non-proprietary, permanent, license-free, and free of charge for research and development.

data provides myriads of opportunities for research and innovation using advanced computational tools and citizen engagement solutions. It offers a baseline digital ecosystem opening avenues to the wide range of upcoming technologies, viz., the cloud, big data, the Internet of Things, augmented reality, and others, for bringing rural transformation by tailoring prepackaged and custom-built landscape intelligence products.

5. Comprehensive Planning and Development: EO data provides thematic information on the various resources. It also provides the basis for deriving high-value landscape insights depicting the project impacts on the ecosystem structure and process in a spatially explicit manner. The suite of biophysical parameters, such as normalized difference vegetation indices, normalized difference vegetation indices, primary productivity, and crop condition, can help quantify the changes, especially in terms of ecosystem services, thus justifying the significant investments incurred in such public service delivery schemes. It also ensures long-term dividends are reaped, moving towards sustainable development goals.

6. Citizen-centric Focus: Open Visualization of the whole data offers substantial opportunities for developing citizen-centric applications such as reporting malpractices,

Public service schemes are evolving rapidly and are being looked beyond mere charity to the villagers to a viable business model bringing a good return on the investment to the stakeholders.

Satellite data provides the most inherent component in ensuring the optimal realization of these schemes to ensure sustained positive impacts on the social-economic and biophysical environment. Enhanced use of geospatial tools in rural development planning will drive future actions nationally.