# **1. Introduction**

Learning outcomes have recently gained increasing importance in the policy debate on basic education in developing countries. Findings reveal that in countries such as India although 93 percent of children ages 6-14 are in school, learning achievements are low. According to the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) in 2005, 67 percent of Indian children in grades 3 to 5 cannot read simple text. The problem of poor quality outcomes is a more general one and is not limited to the education sector. Various public services across many countries suffer from poor quality (Global Corruption Report, 2006; World Development Report, 2004).

Targeting resources efficiently to communities and getting public workers to perform their tasks have remained a challenge for several public services in developing countries. This challenge is thought to be due to weak mechanisms of accountability in public service delivery, resulting in dysfunctional services. Chaudhury et al (2006) document provider absence rates among publicly funded health workers and school teachers in six developing countries- Bangladesh, Ecuador, India, Indonesia, Peru and Uganda. Absence rates in these countries range from 11 to 27 percent among primary school teachers. Despite these high rates, health workers and teachers are rarely held accountable for their absences.

Clearly, interventions that provide physical resources alone are not enough to improve outcomes if workers delivering the service do not perform as expected. The notion of grass roots participation by the community in local monitoring has gained prominence in recent years and is regarded as key in improving public service delivery (World Development Report, 2004). The idea behind this approach is that since the community is the direct beneficiary of these public services, it has a greater incentive to monitor the services than the state or district governments. However there are potential problems with this approach. Monitoring public services is a public good and therefore may be subject to free rider problems. It may also be prone to capture by local elites. Whether or not community participation actually works to improve service delivery is an empirical question.

With the intention of increasing service providers’ accountability to the local community, a number of developing countries including India are decentralizing control over local public services to local communities. Many Indian states have devolved control over schools to the local communities, through greater involvement of village education committees and parent-teacher associations in school oversight roles. However, anecdotal reports and survey-based evidence indicate that communities and members of the local governments are often uninformed of what services they are entitled to and what state mandated controls they have over these services (CAG report, 2001; Bardhan and Mukherjee, 2005; Banerjee et al, 2006). Although it is mandatory for the communities to oversee service delivery, our baseline survey also reveals that village education committee meetings are rarely held and the community is neither aware of nor participating in its oversight roles especially in two of the three states where the study was conducted. High teacher absence rates recorded in a number of Indian states in 2