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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Ethics & economics

Ethics & economics

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published Published on Oct 7, 2011   modified Modified on Oct 7, 2011
-The Indian Express
 
There was a bitter argument over the provisional poverty line put out by the Planning Commission in an affidavit to the Supreme Court, which drew the line at Rs 32 per capita per day in urban areas and Rs 26 per person in rural areas. The Planning Commission has now “clarified” its position. While the Tendulkar Committee line will remain a point of reference, various welfare entitlements will now hinge on a socio-economic-caste census. This census will aim to identify real levels of deprivation, and anti-poverty programmes will be pitched at the specific populations who most need them.

There is a list of automatic exclusion factors (like having a household member in the government’s employ, or households owning mechanised agricultural equipment, households paying income tax or professional tax, etc) and a list of those who will be compulsorily covered (like households without shelter, destitutes, manual scavengers, former bonded labourers, etc). The remaining households will be sorted by deprivation indicators, and would qualify for welfare programmes (where universal coverage is not possible), depending on their place in the priority list. For instance, Indira Awas Yojana may be directed at households with kuchcha walls and roofs, as identified by the census. This elaborate eligibility mechanism means the government will have to develop the administrative systems, the capacity to map deprivation as clearly as possible, and deliver various welfare entitlements with minimal slippage or arbitrariness. Delivery management will be crucial to its success.

Unfortunately, India’s welfare schemes have long been unable to ensure that genuinely needy constituencies are not left out; nor have they been able to prevent the relatively better-off from infiltrating the beneficiary lists. Effort has gone into reworking who’s eligible for state support of various kinds; reworking the nature of that support should not be far behind. The option of cash transfers should always be kept open; alternatives to the PDS devised; and technological mechanisms — especially with the UID — must be rigorously investigated. The targets of state action are to be more clearly identified on a macro level; getting benefits to those targeted is the flip side of that effort. The Centre would do well to remember that this is an effort in which some states do better than others — and than the Centre. Learning from state-level experiments with policy, which the UPA has been loath to do for some reason, is particularly relevant in the effort to re-energise state support of the poor.

The Indian Express, 5 October, 2011, http://www.indianexpress.com/news/ethics-&-economics/855801/


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