Millions of poor continue to remain untouched by a slew of social sector programmes like the Jawahar Rozgar Yojana (JRY) or the Integrated Rural Development Programme (IRDP) in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, the two northern states with maximum concentration of poverty, an evaluation study by the Planning Commission has revealed.
About 70% of the households in the lowest two quintiles of per capita consumption, that is, the real poor, have not received any coverage, the study says. On the other hand, a sizeable proportion of those covered by the schemes were actually not poor.
Another major finding of the study has been that majority of the poor people had to go through middlemen to reap the benefits of the programmes despite having bribed the officials at the village level.
In respect of the self-employment programmes (mainly the IRDP), the study largely covered individual beneficiaries as very few self-help groups were formed in the villages and these too had not started any regular activity.
At the time of the survey, only about 41% of the assets acquired through credit-cum-subsidy loans were surviving. The percentage of the surviving assets was only 24.5% for loans taken before 1990.
Targeting of beneficiaries was better in wage-employment programmes (mainly because only the poor volunteered for the hard work involved in public works). However, a substantial part, half, on an average, of the available limited funds was ?leaked?.
This adversely affected both the quality of public works and the employment generated. The total quantum of spending on employment programme was, in any case, inadequate in providing an adequate measure of employment security to the labourers.
Housing programmes, which absorbed the second highest quantum of resources after the wage employment programmes, were better targeted at the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and OBC households and about 20% of the beneficiaries were found to be ineligible on income criterion. Most of the beneficiaries had to make payments to the Pradhans, the Lokhpals, Tehsil officials or police to get benefits from the programmes. In a majority of cases, loans had to be paid either through asset adjustments or further debts, increasing the vulnerability of the poor household. The proportion of defaults was greater among the poorer borrowers.
In most cases, the list of beneficiaries was prepared by Pradhans. The Pradhan, the village-level government functionaries and other middlemen and bureaucrats were the ultimate arbiters of who the beneficiaries would be.
Schemes to be taken up under the JRY or other programmes were rarely finalised in gram sabha meetings.However, people expressed a little more confidence in panchayats than in the bureaucracy in selection of beneficiaries.
Implementation of poverty alleviation programmes in Bihar presents more or less the same picture as in Uttar Pradesh. A sample survey conducted in 1998 revealed that 5.2% of the households had benefited under IRDP during the five years immediately preceding the survey. However, the percentage of beneficiary households and average size of benefit appeared to be biased against the poor. Not only did a higher percentage of households from big peasant and landlord classes benefit, the average size of the benefits was also higher for these classes. Beneficiaries were forced to buy poor quality assets, had to pay bribes and later return the loans, and hence in a sense, were worse off. Only about 1.6 percentage households benefited from JRY.
In respect of the anti-poverty programmes in general, the villagers said they often had to depend on middlemen for benefits of any government programme and pay bribes to get schemes sanctioned. The people saw government functionaries as inaccessible, inefficient and corrupt. Though JRY was found to be better-received, works undertaken in the programme were meager.