It is going to be a tremendous challenge for the government to meet its social sector expenditure commitments it had chalked out for the 11 th Five Year Plan. The actual total spend for four years out of the five as laid out in the Budget tables including those for 2010-11, show the government has not crossed the 50% mark in several cases and is way off almost everywhere.
The alternatives are therefore clear.
Either the government finds the cash to make up this scale of shortfall or as the table demonstrates, in the case of all the flagship programmes, it will have to scale down the planned spend for each before the end of the 11th Plan period that runs from 2007-08 to 2011-12.
Except for the National Rural Employment Guarantee programme, which is demand driven and therefore impossible for the government to short change, the actual funds made available for each of the schemes the actual funding is far below the target after four of the five years of the Plan.
In the case of the National Rural Health Mission the gap is above 50%.
This means in the next Budget, the finance minister will have to provide a sum equivalent to the total of the entire amount he has provided in the past four years for the Plan projections to be realised.
This is, of course, assuming that the Centre and the states have the capacity to absorb such a massive rise in funding in just one year. Whether the finance minister will be able to find the funds to finance that sort of a jump is an equally difficult question.
Fe made the calculations by adding up the numbers for the revised estimates for all the years for these schemes since 2007-08. For the year 2010-11, as only the Budget Estimates are available now, those numbers have been used. To put those numbers in perspective, the minister will have to exactly double the hike in social sector spend he made this year to Rs 271 lakh crore from Rs 137 lakh crore.
Of course, some of the schemes have reasons for slipping up partially. The Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan for instance, under the ministry of human resource development, did not begin in 2007-08. The scheme coalesced into its present form only from the fiscal year 2009-10. But even there the actual spend is so short of even a possible four year revised target, that there is no ghost of a possibility of achieving it.
According to PK Joshi, director of the National Academy of Agricultural Research Management, Hyderabad, government measures in social sector during last few years have been far from satisfactory. Rajesh Tandon, president of the Society for Participatory Research in Asia, one of India? largest voluntary sector organizations, said this happened because in most of the social sector programme, the implementation system is the same, ?which makes it inefficient. There has been no effort to improve monitoring and project implementation?.