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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Inclusive exclusion by Ashok V Desai

Inclusive exclusion by Ashok V Desai

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published Published on Apr 5, 2010   modified Modified on Apr 5, 2010

For no fault of theirs, the poor have given the government much trouble. Unlike Blacks or Women, two other classes of people chosen often for favours, the poor do not distinguish themselves; and if they are identified by means of external criteria, their characteristics can be faked or forged. The temptation to do so becomes overwhelming when the government gives favours — rations, jobs, places in schools, medical treatment — only to the poor. So a large proportion of these favours goes to those who are not poor. Foremost amongst the fortunate are government functionaries who are supposed to identify the poor and pass on favours to them. They pass on the favours to themselves instead, and get ever richer. To protect the business, they infiltrate the party that gives the favours. That is how the party gets corrupted.

The corruption is good for the party; it keeps its rank and file happy and gives them an interest in getting the party re-elected. But once in a while a supporter gets pangs of conscience about the dishonesty of it all, and does some introspection. Jean Drèze is not a Congressman or a bureaucrat: on the contrary, he is a man of conscience who lives on very little and spends his life in social service. But he believes that the government should serve the people; he was one of the people who inspired the national rural employment guarantee programme. No wonder his conscience troubles him sometimes. The Congress leaders organized a grand celebration of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act; Jean Drèze kept away from it. When the finance minister called the NREGA a magnificent success, Jean Drèze said that “this is bound to sound a trifle heroic to anyone who is familiar with the ground realities”.

But unlike cynics like me, Jean Drèze is not prepared to condemn the NREGA or contemplate its termination. He keeps thinking of ways of improving it; and since he was once an economist, his ideas are often sensible. One of the issues he has seriously thought about recently is the problem of identifying the poor. In an article in the Economic and Political Weekly (XLV. 9), he and Reetika Khera start with the notoriously poor correlation between the really poor and those the government has identified as being below the poverty line: 18 per cent of those amongst the richest 20 per cent villagers had BPL cards, while 47 per cent of the poorest fifth did not have one. According to my calculations based on these statistics, the proportion of those in the two poorest quintiles who did not get BPL cards comes to 21 per cent of the entire population, and the proportion of those in the two richest quintiles who got cards comes to nine per cent. So the proportion of the population in respect of which the government made a mistake comes to 30 per cent. The proportion to whom it gave BPL cards was 34 per cent. Compare this with the 30 per cent who should have got cards and did not and those who should not have got cards and did. If proof was needed that the government’s identification of the poor through its own functionaries is so inaccurate as to be worthless, this is it.

My reaction to these figures would be that the BPL was a misstep and should be wound up; the benefits of terminating it are greater than those of continuing it — except of course for the ruling party and its corrupt supporters. Jean Drèze’s reaction is, let us look for a way of identifying the poor that is less manipulable. He takes four indicators that a rural household is not poor — that it has a pucca house, that it has a pucca house with many rooms, that it has six acres of unirrigated land (irrigated land being taken as equal to twice as much unirrigated land), or that it has any one of the following: a car, a fridge, a telephone, a scooter, a colour television, or electricity plus tap water plus flush toilet. Almost every household that has land above the limit also has a pucca house with many rooms; so one of the two criteria can be dispensed with. Of rural households, 23 per cent had one of the assets; besides having one of the assets, five per cent had land, six per cent had a pucca house with many rooms, and eight per cent had a single-room pucca house.

The use of exclusion criteria would be unacceptable to the government because they would exclude many of the Congress’s favourites: scheduled castes and tribes (32 per cent of the households), landless (42 per cent), agricultural workers (33 per cent), households headed by women (15 per cent) and households without an adult who studied beyond Class V (39 per cent). To get them in, one would have to add an inclusion criterion.

With the four above exclusion criteria and five inclusion criteria, one has choice of 20 combinations between the two. Jean Drèze and Reetika Khera get a bit impatient at this point and work out proportions for only four combinations: an exclusionary approach which ignores inclusion criteria and rejects a household only if it meets any of the exclusion criteria; an inclusionary criterion which ignores exclusion criteria and selects a household only if it meets any of the inclusion criteria; a play-safe approach which rejects a household only if it does not meet any of the selection criteria and is then rejected by one of the exclusion criteria, and a restrictive approach which selects a household only if it meets any of the selection criteria and is not rejected by any of the exclusion criteria.

All the criteria are pretty good at including the poorest. Both the inclusionary and the play-safe approaches would bring more than 50 per cent of the richest quintile into the category of the poor, and deserve to be rejected for that reason. In other words, a programme which includes everyone who has one of the politically desirable qualities cannot be a pro-poor programme. The exclusionary and the restrictive approaches give the most desirable outcomes in the sense of covering the poor and excluding the rich. Both involve excluding those who have undesirable assets; the exclusionary approach stops there, while the restrictive approach selects from those who do not have undesirable assets only those who have one of the desirable qualities. Both give about the same results. They reject 13 per cent of agricultural workers (presumably because of other sources of income — for instance, a son working in a city), 20 per cent of landless households (presumably because they have occupations not involving land), 18 per cent of households headed by women (presumably because the women have remunerative occupations) and six per cent of households without an educated adult (presumably because it is possible to make a good living out of agriculture without knowing how to read). Of the two, the exclusion approach gives a higher coverage of the poor, and thus comes out best in my judgment. The best way to identify the poor is to exclude all who have at least one of the designated assets, and ignore all else.

The Telegraph, 6 April, 2010, http://www.telegraphindia.com/1100406/jsp/opinion/story_12291117.jsp

Tagged with: NREGA



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