Implementation and Monitoring of Rural Development schemes – A study of select Districts in Arunachal Pradesh

Arunachal Pradesh, a State in North Eastern India has approximately 80 per cent of the people residing in rural area and thus being a rural state, depends totally upon central assistance. There are various Centrally Sponsored Schemes like MGNREGA, IAY etc that are designed by the Government of India for alleviation of rural poverty and bring in development. In Arunachal Pradesh, the Department of Rural Development is the chief institution that is responsible for implementation and monitoring of these developmental schemes. But whether or not they fulfill their responsibility sincerely is questionable as is evident from the present scenario of Arunachal Pradesh, which is not very pleasant. This research paper is descriptive in nature. Multi-staged sampling is used to collect data from three districts of Arunachal Pradesh. Both primary and secondary data is used for this paper. The paper tries to compare the opinion of three groups that comprise of the officials of the Department of Rural Development, the people’s representatives and the community regarding implementation and monitoring of various schemes in the State using One-way ANOVA technique. From the data it is found out that the opinion of the three groups vary extensively with regards to implementation and monitoring of the rural development schemes in the district. Thus it indicates that there might a lacuna with regards to implementation and monitoring process.


Introduction
Nearly 70 per cent of the India's population lives in rural areas (Census of India, 2011). These rural populations can be described as mass poverty, low levels of literacy and income, high level of unemployment, poor nutrition and health status. In order to deal with these particular problems, various rural development programmes are being implemented to create opportunities for improving the quality of life of these rural people (Ganiee, 2014). The Annual Plan 2012-13 of Department of Planning, government of Arunachal Pradesh unveil that, the prevalence of poverty in Arunachal Pradesh has been more or less stagnant during the last two decades. A paradigm shift in our approach towards our work and thought process while preparing and implementing centrally sponsored schemes in the district is essential for accelerated development ("Upper Subansiri", 2014). Therefore all the heads of offices and Panchayat leaders should put more efforts and dedication towards their duties so that the Government schemes are implemented in both letter and spirit in the grass-root level and reach up to the needy people ("DRDA Governor", 2014). Panchayati Raj Institution is the strength of rural development in India, which empowered rural people and increased mass participation in development process. All centrally sponsored and state schemes are implemented by the Panchayati Raj Institution in rural India. But due to corruption in Panchayats functionaries, benefits of all programmes do not reach actual beneficiaries in rural India and people are not interested to participate in development works (Biswas, 2013). To avoid this kind of problem the Panchayat leaders should select genuine beneficiaries and ensure the proper implementation of the scheme in the ground level ("DRDA Governor", 2014). People's participation is a prerequisite to diminish all problems may it be implementation or evaluation (Singh, 2013). Therefore, the present study will give us an insight related to the discrepancies in the implementation and monitoring of the rural development Schemes in the State.

Literature Review
The public service department of any country is regarded as a transformational institution because of its eternal responsibility of implementing public policies and programmes and rendering of essential services to the general masses, which means the activities of government employees and institutions aims at formulating and implementing governmental policies and programmes for the interests of the public (Agba, Ochimana and Abubakar, 2013). Centrally sponsored schemes have to be implemented with dedication , true work culture and determined efforts ("East Siang", 2014) because the impact of such programmes depend to a great extent on how well they are implemented (Mathur, 1995). However, the existing information reveals that each programme achieved a limited success with little tangible benefits to the real beneficiaries. Little was achieved in terms of increased production, income and welfare of the potential beneficiaries. It is thus clear that benefits of development have not trickled down to the rural masses as perceived by the planners and policy makers (Gill et al., 1999). Besides, Member of Parliament had also expressed dissatisfaction over the poor implementation of schemes (MP dissatisfied, 2014). Adding to the woes there are reports like misuse of funds like MLA local area development (LAD) fund being misused by the local MLA and of centrally sponsored schemes like MGNREGA and IAY by extending benefits to undeserving and dead persons ("Misuse of", 2014). Lack of achievement in these and other areas cannot be due only to faulty implementation. There are socio political factors including faculty organisation designs and ineffective managerial process. Poverty alleviation programmes and policies need sound organisation, trained and dedicated personnel with concern for superior performance, proper co-ordination and controls, effective implementation, prompt decision making, monitoring and regulation of operations, analysis of activities and results in each section, moral and material incentives to groups and individuals. Incidence shows that well designed projects end up with poor performance when implemented because of inadequate attention to management problems such as those mentioned above (Metha, 1985). The idea of rural development is considered as an improvement in the economic and social conditions of the rural people, it is a total process of economic, social and human development (Gill, 1999). Yet for developed plans to be implemented, the organization needs employees who have the necessary commitment, concern and competency ( Bacwayo, 2002). Also any developmental programme would not be successful in developing rural areas or helpful in achieving the desired goals of prosperity without effective participation of the people, therefore the bureaucratic and impersonal process of implementation of rural programmes should be discarded (Gill, Mustafa, Jehangir and Chaudhary, 1999). objectives 1) To compare the opinion of three groups regarding implementation of rural development schemes 2) To compare the opinion of three groups regarding monitoring of rural development schemes

Research Methodology
This paper is descriptive in nature. In order to fulfill the objectives, primary data was collected using questionnaire and secondary data was collected through various sources like Government Official publications, websites, books and journals etc. Multi-staged sampling was used for this study which comprised of Census and Judgmental Sampling. First of all the districts were selected on the basis of their performance in the year 2012-13. The three districts of Arunachal Pradesh that were considered for the study are Lower Subansiri, Papumpare and Upper Subansiri. After selecting the three districts, census method was applied inorder to survey the employees of the Department of Rural Development, Arunachal Pradesh. Officials represent the Group A and Group B categories of the employees working in the Department of Rural Development, Government of Arunachal Pradesh. The sample size of the respondents was 70 officials from the Department of Rural Development, Arunachal Pradesh. In the next step two villages were considered from each block with the highest and the lowest population. After that Judgmental method was used for the selection of the People's representatives (45) and the community people (459). Statements in the questionnaire were in five point likert scale where a score of 5 was assigned to strongly agree, 4 to agree, 3 to neutral, 2 to disagree and 1 to strongly disagree.

Analysis and Findings Implementation of the schemes
Proper implementation of the schemes always had direct impact on the overall development of the society and that is why proper implementation of the schemes is a pre-requisite for any developmental activities to take place. Table 1 presents us the comparison among different categories of respondents regarding their opinion on whether there is any lacuna in the implementation of the schemes in their respective areas. The result shows us that majority of the Officials disagree (47.3%) to strongly disagree (40.5%) that there might be some discrepancies in the implementation of the schemes. If we look at the response of the community representatives more than 35 percent (both agree and strongly agree) of them had provided positive response to the question. However, when it came to the general mass it is evident that more than 50 percent of the respondents agreed that the schemes are not being imple mented properly in their respective areas. As it can be seen that there is a difference in the opinion of the respondents regarding implementation of the schemes it is necessary to check through One-way ANOVA whether this difference is significant or not. Thus to find out whether the difference in the opinion among three categories of respondents are significant a null hypothesis was formulated.
Ha: There is no significant difference in the opinion of the respondents regarding lacuna in implementation of schemes.  2 indicates that we reject the null hypothesis since p-value is less than 0.01 significant level and therefore we can interpret that difference in the opinion of these three groups regarding proper implementation of the schemes is significant. Thus we tried to survey more deep into different categories of respondents like People's representatives and also districts.

Figure 1 Analysis of different categories of community representatives regarding lacuna in implementation of schemes source: Made by the author
The result from the above figure 1 shows us that there is a huge difference in opinion between different categories of community representatives regarding proper implementation of schemes. It can be seen that more than 60 percent of the Zillas had either disagreed to strongly disagree that the schemes are not implemented properly. However majority of the Anchals (65%) and the village headmen (37.5%) have either agreed or strongly agreed that the schemes are not being implemented properly. Thus we can see that there are some discrepancies here as the category of the people's representatives who are the main link to the common masses agreed that there is some lacuna in the implementation process If we look at the results of different districts regarding this issue in figure 2 it can seen that majority of respondents from all three districts have agreed that the schemes are not implemented properly in their respective districts. Lower Subansiri district have maximum (more than 60 percentage) number of respondents who had agreed to strongly agreed that there is some lacuna in the implementation of schemes followed by Papumpare (58%) and Upper Subansiri (54%) districts.

Monitoring of the schemes
Monitoring is an integral process for the success any project especially in public sector organizations, and for proper monitoring competent manpower is required. Thus an effort was also made to find out whether there is regular monitoring of the various schemes of the Department of Rural Development, Arunachal Pradesh.

source: Primary data
On enquiring whether there is regular monitoring of the rural development schemes, it was found out that (Table 3) more than 85 percentage of the Officials either agreed or strongly agreed that they follow regular monitoring of schemes in their Department. As far as the Community Representatives are concerned more than 50 percentage of them provided positive response that there is regular monitoring of the schemes however a considerable number (40%) of them provided negative response to the query. But if we look at the responses of the common people it is evident that the picture might be something different as more than 60 percentage of them have provided negative response to the query on regular monitoring as compared to 30 percentage of them who provided positive response.
Therefore inorder to find out whether this difference in the opinions regarding regular monitoring of the schemes is significant amongst the Officials, Community Representatives and the Common people, a null hypothesis was formulated.
Hb: There is no significant difference in the opinion of the respondents regarding conduct of regular monitoring of schemes  (Table 4) it can see seen that the null hypothesis is rejected as the p-value is less than 0.01 significant level. Thus we can interpret that there is a significant difference in the responses of those three groups viz-the Officials, Community Representatives and the Common People.
Further analysis was carried out to find out whether there is any difference in the opinion regarding regular monitoring of the schemes amongst the community representatives. From figure 3 it is evident that there is a huge difference in the response amongst the Community Representatives as 100 percent of the Zillas had agreed that there is regular monitoring of the schemes as compared to Anchals and the Village Headmen. More than 70 percentage of the Village Headmen had provided negative response to whether there is regular monitoring of schemes as compared to 27 percentage of them who had provided positive response. As far as the Anchals are concerned 40 percentage of them opted either for disagree or strongly disagree as compared to 27 percentage who either agreed or strongly agreed to the query. Analysis of different districts was also carried out to find out the variation in their opinion regarding the regular monitoring of the schemes by the officials of the Department of rural development, Arunachal Pradesh. It can be seen from figure 4 that Upper Subansiri (49%) and Papumpare (48%) districts provided positive response to whether there is regular monitoring of the rural development schemes in their respective districts as compared to Lower Subansiri district (51%) who responded either disagree or strongly disagree to the issue.