-Deccan Herald The government’s decision to make Aadhaar mandatory for children to avail midday meals in schools and nutrition under the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) programme as well as for disabled students to get scholarships is wrong and ill-conceived. The decision was notified this week and it has given the students only a few weeks to comply with it. Aadhaar has been made mandatory for 11 services under a number...
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Holes in the security net -Anindita Adhikari & Inayat Anaita Sabhikhi
-The Indian Express Demonetisation shows India’s Social welfare measures like MGNREGS to be worryingly patchy Following the announcement of demonetisation, reports of its devastating impact on informal sector workers, farmers and migrants began to pour in from across the country. Seeking evidence on two questions — do social security measures work in the face of such an economic shock, and do these programmes themselves face disruption because of demonetisation — we conducted...
More »Social sector may be victim of inadequate budget -Bappaditya Chatterjee
-IANS Kolkata: Lack of policy directions for ensuring quality implementation of programmes makes the Union Budget 2017-18 allocations to ailing core social sectors like education and health inadequate in delivering the benefits, experts say. Schemes like Swachh Bharat-Urban and the National Social Assistance Programme saw no increase, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan got a mere 4.4 per cent rise in allocation, while the Integrated Child Development Services got an enhancement of about five per...
More »Reading between the lines: Forget the rhetoric, this is no Budget for India's poor -Harsh Mander
-Scroll.in India's social-sector spending remains woefully low and despite claims of being a pro-farmer Budget, the effective allocations are nearly the same as last year. Some commentators expected that the Union Budget 2017-’18 would craft a sharp departure from earlier budgets of this government. This it would do to mitigate the immense suffering of millions of casual workers, farmers and small traders caused by the “shock and awe” of the astoundingly callous...
More »Before Universal Basic Income, We Must First Get Social Spending Basics Right -Anjana Thampi and Ishan Anand
-TheWire.in The Economic Survey 2016-17 devotes a chapter to the provision of a Universal Basic Income (UBI), describing it as a “raging new idea,” a “radical new vision” and “the shortest path to eliminating poverty”. While warning that the UBI “should not become the Trojan horse that usurps the fiscal space for a well-functioning state,” the survey says a de facto UBI can be instituted in the existing “fiscal space”. It...
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