The Role of Various Agencies in Policy Evaluation

Every government policy – whether it’s a rural employment scheme, a nutrition programme, or a digital payments push – eventually faces the same question: did it actually work? Answering that question is the job of policy evaluation, and the quality of that answer depends heavily on who is doing the evaluating. Different agencies bring different strengths, blind spots, and incentives to the table. Understanding which type of agency is best suited for which kind of assessment is central to building a credible, evidence-based policy system.

Why the choice of evaluator matters 🔗

Policy evaluation is the systematic assessment of whether a programme achieved its intended outcomes, used resources efficiently, and produced any unintended consequences. But evaluation is never a neutral technical exercise. The agency conducting the study shapes what questions get asked, what data gets collected, how findings are framed, and ultimately whether the results lead to reform. A ministry evaluating its own flagship scheme will approach the exercise very differently from an independent audit body or a parliamentary committee.

In practice, evaluations in India are conducted by four broad categories of agencies: specialised evaluation bodies, internal units within ministries, legislative committees, and ad hoc or special committees. Each offers a distinct mix of expertise, objectivity, and reach – and modern governance increasingly relies on combining them rather than depending on any single one.

Specialised evaluation agencies 🔗

Specialised agencies are bodies set up with the explicit mandate of evaluating public programmes. They employ trained evaluators, use structured methodologies, and typically operate at arm’s length from the ministries whose programmes they assess. This combination of expertise and distance is what gives their findings credibility.

At the national level, the most prominent example is the Development Monitoring and Evaluation Office (DMEO), an attached office under NITI Aayog. DMEO conducts independent evaluation studies of both Central Sector and Centrally Sponsored Schemes, and also carries out quick assessment studies for rapid, need-based reviews of recently launched initiatives. To ensure efficient use of public resources, the Government of India has made evaluation of these schemes mandatory before fresh appraisal, and DMEO has been assigned the responsibility of conducting independent third-party evaluations in a time-bound manner.

DMEO’s predecessor, the Programme Evaluation Organisation (PEO), was established in 1952 as an independent agency within the erstwhile Planning Commission to evaluate programmes funded by the Five-Year Plans, with regional offices in state capitals reporting to the PEO headquarters. This long institutional memory is one reason specialised agencies can conduct comparative, longitudinal assessments that newer bodies cannot.

Strengths and limitations 🔗

The main advantage of specialised agencies is methodological rigour. They use internationally recognised frameworks – DMEO, for instance, applies the RCEESI+E framework (Relevance, Coherence, Efficiency, Effectiveness, Sustainability, Impact, and Equity) – which makes their findings comparable across sectors and over time. Their independence from implementing ministries also reduces the risk of self-serving conclusions.

The trade-offs are real, though. Specialised agencies often face capacity constraints, slow turnaround times, and the challenge of getting cooperation from ministries that may view external evaluation with suspicion. As one review of Indian evaluation practice has noted, several ministries continue to treat evaluation as an exercise in accountability rather than learning, which limits how seriously findings are absorbed into redesign.

Internal evaluation units 🔗

Internal units sit within the ministry or department that designs and implements the policy. A monitoring cell inside the Ministry of Rural Development assessing MGNREGA implementation, or a planning division within a state department reviewing its own welfare schemes, would be examples.

Their biggest advantage is proximity. Internal evaluators have direct access to administrative data, field reports, and institutional context that outsiders often struggle to obtain. They understand operational realities – why a particular form gets delayed, how a state-level bottleneck arose, which officer is responsible for what – and can feed findings back into decision-making quickly.

But this proximity is also their weakness. An internal unit evaluating its parent ministry’s flagship scheme faces obvious incentive problems. Findings that reflect poorly on senior officials may be softened, delayed, or quietly shelved. The evaluation may focus on inputs and outputs (money spent, beneficiaries registered) rather than outcomes and impact (did lives actually improve). A well-documented concern is that scheme-level evaluation units often consist of members with limited evaluation experience, resulting in financial reporting rather than outcome analysis.

To mitigate this, there is a growing push for ministries with large budgets to set up dedicated monitoring and evaluation (M&E) cells with technical support from DMEO, with standardised protocols and stronger links to annual planning cycles.

Legislative committees 🔗

Legislative committees bring something no bureaucratic body can: democratic legitimacy. When elected representatives examine a policy, they do so on behalf of citizens, and their findings carry political weight that a technical report rarely does.

The Public Accounts Committee 🔗

The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) is the oldest and arguably most powerful of India’s financial committees. It currently comprises 22 members – 15 from the Lok Sabha and 7 from the Rajya Sabha – and since 1967, its chairperson has conventionally been drawn from the opposition, usually the Leader of the Opposition. This opposition-led leadership is a deliberate design choice that strengthens its watchdog role.

The PAC’s core function is to examine the audit reports of the Comptroller and Auditor General and to scrutinise whether money granted by Parliament was spent for the purposes authorised. Beyond appropriation accounts, it also reviews performance reviews of regulatory bodies, the implementation of centrally sponsored welfare schemes, and policy measures underway for the energy transition – a scope that goes well beyond pure financial accounting into substantive policy evaluation.

Other financial and departmental committees 🔗

Alongside the PAC, the Estimates Committee – comprising 30 Lok Sabha members – reviews budgetary estimates and recommends measures for economy and efficiency, while the Committee on Public Undertakings (COPU) evaluates the performance of public sector enterprises. There are also 24 Departmentally Related Standing Committees that scrutinise the demands for grants, bills, and annual reports of specific ministries.

Strengths and limitations of legislative evaluation 🔗

The strengths are significant. Legislative committees can summon officials, demand documents, hold cross-examinations, and publish findings that attract media attention. They examine policies through multiple lenses – legal, fiscal, social, political – and bring ground-level citizen concerns into the conversation. Their reports are public, which adds pressure for follow-up.

The limitations are equally well-known. Committee recommendations are not binding on the executive. Members rotate frequently and often lack deep technical expertise. Reports can be delayed, and even when tabled, the follow-up on accepted recommendations is uneven. Still, the committee system remains indispensable for holding implementation to account.

The Comptroller and Auditor General 🔗

A discussion of evaluating agencies would be incomplete without the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG), established under Article 148 of the Constitution as the supreme audit institution. While the CAG is technically an audit body rather than a policy evaluator, its role has steadily expanded.

The CAG today conducts performance audits that go well beyond traditional financial checks, assessing whether government schemes achieved their intended outcomes with optimal use of resources. This expanded mandate was affirmed by a 2013 Supreme Court judgment that recognised the CAG’s authority to conduct performance audits of government policies. Audits of infrastructure delays, telecom spectrum allocation, and welfare scheme leakages have all shaped public debate and, in several cases, forced policy rethinks. CAG reports feed directly into the PAC’s work, creating a continuous loop between audit, legislative scrutiny, and executive action.

Special and ad hoc committees 🔗

For issues that cut across ministries or require fresh thinking, governments often appoint special committees or commissions. These are temporary bodies with a specific mandate and a defined timeline. Classic examples include the various Administrative Reforms Commissions, the Law Commission of India, and issue-specific panels such as the Kelkar Committee on fiscal reform or the Mashelkar Committee on auto fuel policy.

Special committees have several advantages. They can bring together domain experts, retired civil servants, academics, and civil society voices who would otherwise not be part of government processes. They are free from the routine constraints of ministries and can take a long, holistic view of a policy area. When done well, their reports become reference documents for a generation of reforms.

The flip side is that many special committee reports gather dust. Without a clear follow-up mechanism, even well-researched recommendations can be selectively implemented or ignored entirely. The quality of the exercise also depends heavily on the committee’s composition – a narrow panel produces a narrow view.

Choosing the right evaluator for the right question 🔗

No single agency can do it all. A good evaluation system matches the evaluator to the question being asked. Routine implementation monitoring is best handled by internal units that can respond in real time. Independent impact assessments – whether a scheme actually changes outcomes – are better suited to specialised agencies using rigorous methodologies. Financial propriety and value-for-money questions fall naturally to the CAG. Questions of political accountability and public concern belong with legislative committees. Fundamental policy rethinks benefit from special committees that can step outside the system and take a long view.

Mature evaluation systems, such as Mexico’s CONEVAL, have shown that institutionalising evaluation – with legal backing, independent funding, and clear links to budget cycles – produces compounding benefits over time. India has taken important steps in this direction through DMEO and evaluation frameworks, but the culture of treating evaluation as a learning tool rather than a compliance exercise is still a work in progress.

What do you think? If you were asked to evaluate a major welfare scheme – say, the PM Kisan direct benefit transfer – which type of agency would you trust most to give you an honest assessment, and why? And do you think making evaluation findings binding on ministries would strengthen governance, or would it reduce the willingness of officials to cooperate with evaluators in the first place?

References

1. https://dmeo.gov.in/evaluation
2. https://ieg.worldbankgroup.org/sites/default/files/Data/reports/ecd_wp28_india_me_0.pdf
3. https://idronline.org/monitoring-and-evaluation-public-policies-rct-india/
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Accounts_Committee_(India)
5. https://www.manoramayearbook.in/current-affairs/india/2024/09/06/public-accounts-committee-upsc.html
6. https://cag.gov.in/en
7. https://www.coneval.org.mx/Paginas/principal-en.aspx