India's welfare programmes are not very good at reaching the poorest of the poor: World Bank

DELHI: How effective are India's innumerable social security programmes at reaching out to the poorest of the poor? If a recent World Bank report is anything to go by, they are woefully inefficient. According to the report, titled " Social Protection for a Changing India", leakages and exclusion errors are endemic across the country.

For instance, just 27% of the PDS' beenficiaries are the poorest of the poor. The World Bank found that this was the predominant trend across all the welfare programmes it studied.

1. Sampoorna Grameen Rozgar Yojana: State-run employment programme that provided food and cash for work: 43.4%
2. Swarna Jayanti Gram Swarozgar Yojana: Subsidised loans to groups of BPL people: 32.9%
3. Indira Gandhi National Old Age Pension: Monthly pension for BPL elderly: 32.8%
4. Annapurna: 10 kilos of food grains for destitutes who are not getting the old age pension: 51.9%
5. Widow pension: Monthly pension for BPL widows: 43.2%
6. Disabled pension: Monthly pension for the disabled: 30.7%
7. Indira Awas Yojana: Subsidy for BPL families for house construction: 28.6%
8. School stipends: Scholarships: 22.6%

This inefficiency is a problem across all Indian states. Take the PDS. Leakages range between 27% (Bengal) and 91.1% (Bihar).

It raises a question. Why does this exclusion take place? Partly because a steady mushrooming of welfare programmes linked to BPL cards has resulted in the village elite competing to get BPL cards. Given that every state has only so many BPL cards it can give out (in line with the Planning Commission's poverty estimates), this excludes the BPL.

That said, the problem goes well beyond targeting. Take MGNREGA. It is open to anyone willing to work below the market wage. However, the poorest of the poor do not turn to NREGA. The programme takes, in the best case scenario, 1-2 weeks to pay its wages. Stories about NREGA workers getting their wages months after working are legion. And the poorest of the poor, so destitute they need cash to eat, if not today then tomorrow, and so disempowered they cannot protest against the delays, instead turn away from NREGA itself.

That is the lesson here. Targeting on its own will be subverted. What is needed is something that reduces this voicelessness of the ultrapoor.