There are many public/private initiatives where performance has to be monitored in far flung areas which are difficult to approach let alone monitor. We faced a similar situation in one of the places where I was working. Our project was to successfully run over 2000 ICT enabled kiosks in rural areas of Himachal Pradesh. These kiosks were supposed to be run by local level entrepreneurs and we were responsible for setting up the infrastructure and making various services available at the kiosk. The kiosks were set up in one of the most inaccessible terrains of Himalayas and of course had its own set of difficulties. Kiosks were there to disseminate different kind of G2C as well as B2C services to their respective panchayat (a collection of around 6 villages) population. Thus each panchayat was supposed to have one such kiosk.
Now let's understand what exactly were we trying to monitor. We wanted to monitor
1. What kind of services are being used in each panchayat.
2. How much is the kiosk operator earning from each service.
Services included printing, photocopy, Internet access, fax, online booking of railway/bus/airline tickets, e-education, Gov. forms (like birth/death certificate, land records, etc.), et al. Some of these services were provided completely online through a portal provided by us and there were appropriate provisions to monitor their usage. However, many other facilities like printing, photocopy, fax, scanning, selling of gov. forms, etc were few of the services which were extremely difficult to monitor. We could have never found out how much is the operator earning through these services and they incidentally were supposed to be the most popular services.
Now how can we measure the usage of such services as accurately as possible to gauge the actual earnings from each kiosk? Of course here is an assumption that the operators will understate their earnings and their are plethora of reasons to support that but I will not go into details discussing them in this post.
Well, to take care of the revenue earned through printing, photocopy, scanning, internet access, et al can be monitored through technology. For example, there are Photocopy/Printing machines available which keeps a count of number of printed/photocopied pages, etc. But the problems were
1. Who will go to each centre to note down the readings? Even if machines are intelligent enough to automatically mail the readings online, still the function can be easily manipulated or better put the machine offline while using it.
2. These machines were way over our budget.
So what else can we do? Install cameras and monitor what is happening in each kiosk? Nope, surely an impractical idea.
This is the plan I proposed. Well not 100% secure but it uses a combination of incentives and punishments to get as close as possible to our goal.
We can use two approaches in tandem.
1. We know that each kiosk has a different set of population to cater to and not all kiosks can earn similar revenue. We planned to divide all the panchyats on the basis of per capita income and population. Thus in a way we tried to measure the earning potential of each kiosk. Based on this data we made multiple categories and grouped together kiosks with similar earning potential. Our idea was to ask each kiosk operator to declare their earnings through each service themselves. Of course in the absence of any tangible monitoring system specially in case of print, photocopy, internet access, scan, selling of gov. forms, etc the operators were free to declare a deflated earning. So we brought in a clause of performance monitoring which stated that if an operator's declared monthly earning goes "below 20% of the average earning stated by the operators of his category" then he will be put in the warning zone and he will have to improve performance or be ready for eviction. In the absence of knowledge about the kiosks which fall in each category, its difficult to collude and declare revenue figures close to each other every month to evade falling in the eviction zone.
2. Introduce value cards for every customer of the kiosks and allow the card to be used across over 2000 kiosks all over the state. Inform every customer that every transaction done, no matter how small, adds up value points on their card and the points can be redeemed for cash, gifts, etc. This gives the incentive to the customer to feed in the information about each and every transaction against their value card. This will urge customers to ensure that all their spending in the kiosks are fed into the system by the operator.
Thus a simultaneous implementation of the above options brought us close to estimating the true business being done by each kiosk.
