Issues brought up in welfare payouts for farm widows are a throwback to the ‘universal basic income’ debate
Two recent BusinessLine reports have pointed to the difficulties arising out of targeting welfare schemes to the intended beneficiaries. In the case of farm suicide widows, one report (January 29) highlights the case of a 38-year-old widow from the Osmanabad district in Maharashtra, whose husband committed suicide about eight years ago but she is yet to receive the ex-gratia compensation; she has also not been receiving the annual payout of ₹6,000 under the PM Kisan Samman Nidhi Yojana despite the land having been transferred to her name. The second report (January 22) refers to the slow progress in verification of land titles, a pre-requisite for accurate targeting under PM-Kisan, which extends relief to farmers holding land up to two hectares. It is time to reflect on whether schemes should be re-tailored in order to reduce scope for mistargeting. The bureaucracy, as researchers have observed, tends to suspect that regular deaths are projected as suicide cases to avail of the ex-gratia amount. This sort of uncertainty gives rise to errors of both inclusion and exclusion, of which the latter is morally more troublesome. The use of the Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-Mobile (JAM) trinity, to use the expression of Economic Survey 2015-16, has helped the beneficiaries by eliminating the ‘cut’ of the middleman in many cases; but instances of MGNREGA payments not reaching the workers concerned have persisted where the population is not socio-economically empowered. There have been reports from central and eastern States of the Aadhaar becoming a hurdle to receiving entitlements. Perhaps realising the prospect of exclusion, the Economic Survey 2016-17 floated the idea of ‘universal basic income’ to supplement the JAM model, which is the genesis of the PM-Kisan scheme or its variants in States such as Telangana and Odisha.
via Inclusion and exclusion errors in social security – The Hindu BusinessLine
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