NEW DELHI - The federal government may give up the practice of presenting an outcome budget for ministries as it has found it to be of little use with the kind of tools being currently deployed for evaluation, a top policymaker said Monday.

Outcome budgets are progress reports of ministries on what they have done with the money allocated to them in the national budget that is presented in parliament each year. It helps in the evaluation of various schemes and improvement in their delivery.

“The outcome budget is not that useful. We need to have better understanding of both the issues involved and the ground situation,” Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia said on the sideline of a conference on the subject here.

Ahluwalia said sectors like health and education needed a different approach as it was difficult to gauge the ground situation. The process of evaluation in such areas was more complex and desired results cannot be expected by manipulating existing data .

He said the government, accordingly, was not pleased with the outcome budget in the present format.

Introduced during 2005-06, the outcome budget was meant to be a tool to discipline all ministries in terms of how and when they spend their allocated money, and ensure that expenditures were not staggered towards the last quarter of the fiscal.

It was also meant to make governance result-oriented, with a focus on outcomes as opposed to outlays.