Strengthening state capacity to improve service delivery for citizens in India

Decision-maker’s challenge

India’s civil service has played a major role in moving millions of people out of poverty and providing a wide range of services to India’s citizenry since the country’s independence. However, to tackle today’s evolving national and global challenges, the civil service needs to be further strengthened and empowered. We believe that Indian civil servants would be more equipped to achieve India’s national goals within a performance management structure that creates stronger incentives for high performance and enables them to receive more targeted capacity building support. We are working to help government departments create such a structure using a goal-oriented, competency-based approach to human resource management within their departments.

Impact opportunity

IDinsight works with various government institutions across different levels of India’s federal architecture to improve the execution capacity of millions of civil servants. Ultimately, this improvement in the government’s execution capacity will better citizens’ lives. 

Since 2020, we have supported the Union Government’s National Programme for Civil Services and Capacity Building — Mission Karmayogi — working closely with the Capacity Building Commission of India and Karmayogi Bharat. Since 2022, we have also collaborated with partners in Bihar, Odisha, and Uttar Pradesh, focusing on urban development, rural livelihoods, health and nutrition, and women’s economic empowerment. This work is supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

In related work, IDinsight has partnered with district-level government institutions in Meghalaya and Uttar Pradesh to implement performance management approaches to improve departmental functioning across sectors like finance, education, and social welfare.

Our approach

IDinsight is implementing a set of interventions – called Goal-Oriented Human Resource Management (GO-HRM) – which connects governments’ goals with individual performance and capacity building. This aims to improve the government’s ability to deliver services through systems and tools that enable it to better identify and resolve constraints to department and individual-level capacity and performance.

As part of this approach, IDinsight supports various government partners to:

1. Set goals and targets: This involves defining departmental goals, which are first delineated into program and team-level objectives and key results, and subsequently into key performance indicators that are linked to individuals.
2. Identify and measure competencies: This entails defining the competencies required for each position within a department to fulfil their key roles and responsibilities. It will be supplemented with an ecosystem for individuals to assess and build competencies.
3. Link capacity and performance: Which involves streamlining the department’s human resource management systems, such as the electronic human resource management system (e-HRMS), workflow and management information systems, and the annual performance assessment record (APAR). Integrating these systems will enable empirically sound, data-driven measurement of competency demonstration and performance, which can further inform HR decision-making.

We work in an embedded capacity to ensure our partners have access to the right monitoring and evaluation tools – such as program design, measurement, and evaluation –  at the right time to implement their vision effectively.

The results

This project is ongoing, and results will be published periodically.