Mission Antyodaya: NDA government begins work on plan to converge social schemes across ministries

NEW DELHI: Aimed at achieving BJP’s larger ambition of 'Antyodaya', or reaching out to the last man, the Centre has started work on a plan to converge social welfare plans and schemes across ministries and target these to reach individual households.

Pitched tentatively as Mission Antyodaya, the move will involve convergence of various government schemes, sharing of infrastructure and resources and multi-pronged strategies to address target households based on their specific deprivations indicated in the recently published SECC, a senior official from the rural development ministry told ET.

The ministry has started efforts to build consensus on this plan, which could see schemes from ministries of health, education, employment and social security (insurance schemes under financial services) come together, said the official. That apart, the first major restructuring based on SECC household-level deprivation data will involve fund distribution of major welfare schemes from next fiscal.

The rural development ministry will soon be writing to states to prepare the labour budget for the next fiscal based on the deprivation parameters reflected in the SECC, the official said.

The ministry has begun the exercise to leverage SECC data to correct the skew in the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) scheme wage distribution (to the tune of about Rs 24,000 crore annually) among states and to ensure better targeting on MGNREGA funding.

The ministry is putting together an indicative labour budget for each state on the basis of SECC data to guide the states. The SECC has already identified 5.37 crore households, which can be described as the landless households deriving major part of their income from manual casual labour that could be potential targets of MGNREGA.

The distribution of these households is likely to guide the labour budget of states under the recast system of welfare funding. Officials said this indicative labour budget based on SECC data would deter the state from inflating their wage expenditures and push states to focus on the deprived sections.