Intra-department Monitoring through Rapid Large Scale Data Collection and Review: Experiences from Integrated Child Development Services in Maharashtra

Abstract Information: Integrated child development services (ICDS) in India, one of the largest social protection program of its kind anywhere in the world caters to all children under six years of age, pregnant women, and nursing mothers through ‘Anganwadi’ or child care centers. These centres provide services that include a creches facility, supplementary nutrition, pre-school education, nutrition & health education, immunization, health check-up and referral services. ICDS in Maharashtra state has over one hundred thousand Anganwadi centers catering to over seven million children and about 1.5 million pregnant women and nursing mothers across all urban and rural habitations. A four-tier administrative system at the State, the district, project, and beat or supervisory circle levels supervises these Centres. The existing MIS system, which collates data of the program, is rigid and does not have the flexibility to add any new indicator to suit the dynamic requirement at the subnational level. In this situation, periodical collection, transmission, and maintaining data from each center is a difficult task limiting the system’s ability to make evidence-based decisions, especially for non-routine purposes and newer parameters warranting a new approach supported by digital tools. A standard operating procedure was implemented to list decisions required at the subnational level, incorporate new indicators, design questionnaires, and collect data using an open-source platform. The data analysis and suitable data visualization were done to provide a more effective decision support system. The creation of standardized data collection, validation, and quality checks reduced the losses in data transfer through traditional means. Local capacity building was also done. The SOP streamlined the review system at the district and the state level. Improvement in the quality, timeliness and accuracy of data collected led to identifying gaps in the infrastructure and effective delivery of ICDS.

Relevance Statement: The advent of Centralised Monitoring and Information Systems should have simplified the routine data collection within government programs through the field-level staff. In the case of the department of women and child development's ICDS, the data formats for the MIS are created at the federal level and followed at the state level. The data entry is done primarily by the Staff posted at the Anganwadi centers, assisted by their beat officer and verified by project and district officers. This system is rigid, slow to respond to changes, and cannot incorporate new data or decision requirements in a dynamic situation. Further, the information about indicators that need to be tracked routinely or frequently should be included in this system, along with validation quality checks. Many input and activity level indicators are to be included from time to time in the interest of more effective implementation of various interventions to improve service delivery. This calls for an IT-enabled, user-friendly data collection system that improves the timely, complete, and accurate collection and management of the data. To address this problem, we listed key decisions required at the State-level for specific planning, reallocation, and other policy-making processes. Based on this, we identified the information required to cater to these decisions fully. Then we designed the indicators and data points that need to be collected to support this information and assigned a frequency to the same - monthly, annual, and one-time/ less frequent. Finally, these indicators were translated into a survey questionnaire for field functionaries. As the information was being requested at the State-level, adding it to existing MIS would require much work. For this, we effectively used the recent increased mobile penetration and literacy for mobile-based offline survey data collection tools and WhatsApp application to rapidly collect data from all field functionaries, primarily women, with limited education. Having effectively collected data with high confidence, we used it to represent ground reality through data visualizations involving maps accurately; the state and district level officials were able to identify better trends, gaps, and contiguous clusters facing similar problems and work towards solving them. While centrally sponsored schemes need a robust central MIS, appropriate customizations should be available with state or district-level decision-makers to collect information of their interest without additional training or investment. This is where the free and open-source data collection, analysis, and visualization tools help and can be quickly disseminated through communication platforms such as WhatsApp groups. We elaborate on our work in making this happen as a case study while connecting it to other large-scale program implementation and monitoring issues. Our learnings and process for this work can help establish better monitoring and review mechanisms at the subnational level in low-resource countries. The standard operating procedure developed is department-agnostic but finds particular relevance to social protection departments like -Public Health, Education, Livelihood Generation, etc.