Mr. Yatin Diwakar will present his APS as per the detail below:

Date: 22 February 2023

Time: 1200 - 1330 hrs.

Venue: CTARA Conference Room No.1

Topic: Understanding National Evaluation System in India

Guide: Prof Bakul Rao

RPC members: Prof Satish B Agnihotri, Prof Trupti Mishra

National Evaluation Systems (NES) are a complex interplay of policies, policy makers, implementers, government evaluation agencies, academia, private entities, funding agencies, civil society organisations, professional evaluations and the community. The simplest of M&E system has four components: a strong MIS for each program, institutional and human resources for conducting evaluation studies, performance management systems, and outcome-based budgeting (Mehrotra, 2012). Strengthening NES requires working with all the stakeholders to ensure that all components are working in tandem with each other. This PhD research was started with an objective to strengthen the evaluation system in India, for which initially assessing its current situation was deemed important. Thus, work was done to document the history of evaluation in India at the government level, followed by assessing the system of outcome measurement, the MISs and evaluation reports produced by the existing evaluation system, before commenting on the way forward through a draft national evaluation policy. These tasks were undertaken in the first four years of research and gaps to complete these objectives are filled in the fifth year. Moving towards the closure of the research, this APS looks at the understanding built in previous years, deepens it theoretically, and proposes how the project of strengthening evaluation systems in India can be taken ahead in the current context.