Plugging Holes in Welfare Net

Context:  Welfare programmes are not reaching the most vulnerable Sections of the population during a disaster

Performance of Social safety welfare schemes during pandemic:

• 23% of the population living in Delhi-NCR had received a payment of Rs 500 in their Jan Dhan accounts within three weeks of the lockdown.
• Farmers registered for Pradhan Mantri KisanSamman Nidhi (PM-KISAN) also received Rs 2,000 immediately.

Challenges in designing social safety nets:

• Exclusion errors: Registries based on specific criteria (E.g., identified Below Poverty Line households) may not identify individuals most vulnerable to crises.
  • 42% of households under PM-KISAN belonged to the wealthiest one-third of the sample, excluding agricultural labourers and urban informal workers.
• Rising incidence of poverty during pandemic: Recent estimates from the World Bank suggest that 88 to 115 million people could slide into poverty in 2020.
• Violation of privacy: Any social registry that can serve as a potential beneficiary platform for safety nets inherently runs the risk of violating individual privacy.
• Problems with targeting: Evidence shows that there are factors that contribute to the alleviation of poverty may differ from the ones that push people into it.
  • About 40% of the poor in 2012 were pushed into poverty by special circumstances and would not have been classified as being poor based on their 2005 conditions.

Way Forward:

• Linkage with Aadhar: Social registries that identify individuals, their place of residence, and their bank accounts, can be linked with Aadhar to allow for geographic targeting.
• Transparent social registry: Social registries should store only basic information such as location, instead of more sensitive identifiers such as poverty status.

Conclusion: Post disaster revalidation of social registries and geographical targeting are some of the methods that worth a try for disaster-proof future welfare programmes.