More than two years after its flagship programme to create jobs for people living below the poverty line, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), was launched, the UPA government continues to struggle when it comes to identifying beneficiaries of such programmes.
While the NREGS performance has been a mixed bag, it has had collateral benefits such as bringing in largely excluded rural populace into the financial mainstream, thanks to a recent decision to make payments directly to beneficiaries? bank accounts. Yet, neither is the NREGS beneficiary list helping identify the target audience for other BPL schemes, nor is there a move to co-ordinate all schemes? efforts to create a reliable database.
Consider this: the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY), a scheme launched last year by the UPA to provide health cover to all BPL families in the unorganised sector, was operationalised this April by the labour and employment ministry. The scheme envisages providing cashless cover to beneficiaries who will be issued fraud-resistant smart cards.
To its surprise, the ministry found that ?non-availability of BPL data in the states? is the biggest bottleneck in implementing the scheme. ?Even the data that is available is incomplete, inconsistent and, in some cases, incorrect,? it says. Despite this, the ministry has been able to issue more than 3.3 lakh smart cards to cover over 16 lakh people under the health insurance cover till September this year. Over 1,458 have availed the hospitalisation facility, involving insurance claim of over Rs 63 lakh, with an average claim of Rs 4,400 in the first two months. However, the lack of data is going to be a major impediment in expanding the scheme?s coverage further.
?We have developed a software to sift through the inconsistencies and validate the data. This will enable faster rollout in some states. However, there are some states that do not have any data regarding the number of BPL people and this will affect the speedy rollout we intended to do,? a labour ministry official said.
Meanwhile, states like Haryana are upbeat about the benefits of the programme and following a request made by chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the scheme?s coverage has been extended to the entire state. The RSBY has also been extended to additional districts in Gujarat, Delhi, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Kerala at the request of the concerned state governments in the first year of implementation itself.
However, most of the north-east states? response has been tepid at best. Barring Nagaland, the other north-eaststates are yet to get moving on the scheme, despite an increase in Central contribution to 90% and repeated follow-ups and reminders from the Centre.
As of now, 18 states have asked for insurance companies to bid for the lowest premia to be charged for the scheme. Of these, 16 states have submitted proposals to the Centre and have been approved.The rollout of smart cards has begun in eight states, while four more states will start issuing these cards in the first half of October.
Incidentally, the UPA government is yet to set up the expert group that needs to undertake a survey to identify the BPL population in the country. Traditionally, the survey is conducted by the ministry of rural development in the first year of every Plan period. But as of now, the expert group is yet to be constituted and work is expected to begin only in 2009, the third year of the 11th Five Year Plan.
In the last three Five Year Plans, different criteria have been used to identify the poor; while income was used as the basis in 1992, consumption was used in 1997. The 10th Plan used a door-to-door census with a 13-point questionnaire that graded households on a scale. This method ran into trouble as the Supreme Court raised queries about the methodology. The apex court felt that the questionnaire was flawed, as for instance, if the daughter of a household went to school, it was considered a sign of ?not being poor?, presenting a ?developmentally backward? picture.
Due to the faulty questionnaire, only some states like Gujarat and Kerala implemented variations of it. To avoid a similar problem, an expert group was to be set up by the rural development ministry and the Planning Commission to advise on the methodology to be adopted.
Meanwhile, the ratio of poor in the country has almost halved from 54.8% of the population in 1973 to 27.5% in 2004. The total number of poor has, however, not actually changed much. Moreover, the current poverty line ? Rs 356 monthly per capita expenditure for rural areas and Rs 458 for urban areas (2004-05) ? is said to be much too low and states like Andhra Pradesh have argued it is hiding poverty incidence.