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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Budget 2022 Shows How Quickly We Forget the Social and Welfare Net That Served Us During COVID -Avani Kapur

Budget 2022 Shows How Quickly We Forget the Social and Welfare Net That Served Us During COVID -Avani Kapur

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published Published on Feb 1, 2022   modified Modified on Feb 2, 2022

-TheWire.in

With revenues of the government expanding significantly, this was an opportunity to present a more expansive budget. Unfortunately, the budget made a clear choice.

Unlike last year, this year expectations from Budget 2022-23 with respect to the social sector – particularly with respect to schemes for nutrition – were low.

While India relied heavily during the peak of the pandemic last year on its welfare architecture, trends on the release of funds by the Union government during the year already gave an indication that keeping the fiscal deficit in check would come at the expense of the social sector.

Till December 2021, with more than three-fourth of the financial year completed, around half of the allocations had been released for many schemes.

Take the example of two important nutrition related programmes: the Integrated Child Development Services (now a part of the newly announced Saksham Anganwadi and POSHAN 2.0) which provides basic education, health, and nutrition services for early childhood development and the Mid-Day Meal Scheme (now renamed Pradhan Mantri Poshan Shakti Nirman) which caters to 118 million school going children by providing hot cooked meals in government and government-aided schools.

The presence of millions of frontline workers in schools and anganwadis allowed us to quickly ensure the delivery of rations and food security allowance directly into people’s homes. Yet, between April to December 2021, only 48% of the approved budgets for mid-day meals had been released. For ICDS, it was 52%.

Therefore, it comes at no surprise that the allocations for mid-day meals are 11% lower than the budget estimates for the previous year. Similarly, even for Saksham Anganwadi and POSHAN 2.0, allocations remain lower than the sum of its components even for the budget estimates of financial year 2020-21.

But there were some surprises. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme (MGNREGA) has been an important social safety net for many during the pandemic. Demand for work remains higher than pre-pandemic levels, though unmet demand (or the difference between employment provided versus demanded) remains high. As per latest data as on February 1, 2022, 7.7 million households that had demanded work have still not received it. Taking cognisance of this increased demand, the supplementary budget announced this year has allocated an additional Rs 25,000 crore to the scheme. Even today, Rs 12,852 crore payments for wages and materials are still pending. Accounting for it, the total expenditure under the scheme stands at Rs 105,774 crore – Rs 7,000 crore more than the revised estimates for the year.

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TheWire.in, 1 February, 2022, https://thewire.in/government/budget-2022-social-welfare-sector-covid-anganwadis-mid-day-meals


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