Delhi tie-up with Nobel Laureates’ J-PAL

The Dialogue and Development Commission (DDCD) of the Delhi government has signed an MoU with Nobel laureates Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo’s J-PAL (Jameel Poverty Action Lab) South Asia, to conduct real-time monitoring of the public services offered by the government.

“The project is aimed at improving the quality of services, identifying service delivery issues, and motivating frontline staff to perform their duties better,” the Delhi government said.

The project will be kicked off as a pilot to study the beneficiary experience in ration shops under the Public Distribution System (PDS) as well as in Mohalla Clinics, Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia said. “Regular programme monitoring is critical for improving public service delivery and beneficiary experience, especially for flagship schemes such as the Ration Shops and Mohalla Clinics. And what better way to monitor than directly getting the citizens’ voices as to how the services are being delivered. It’s also a matter of pride that we are collaborating with a think tank led by Nobel laureates to pilot such a model across government schemes for the first time in India,” Sisodia said.

Delhi government said that an outbound call centre will be established to gather real-time monitoring data on the quality of programme implementation. “The data will be collected directly from thousands of beneficiaries daily. This data will be used to generate reports for the government. The reports will contain performance reports, disaggregated at a block level, and provide clear visibility of what is happening on the ground,” the Delhi government said.