By ET Bureau | 28 Jan, 2014, 04.00AM IST
Cash transfers fumbled in implementation in the six districts of Rajasthan where it was launched and where the Congress was routed.
By Akshay Deshmane
"We have also created the right to identity so that your money reaches you directly. It is the largest anti-corruption platform that anyone has ever built. It will enable people to get their benefits and entitlements without paying a bribe." — Rahul Gandhi, addressing theCongress Party, on January 17.
In time, the Congress' leader-in-waiting might be proven right. But for now, his government's big push on moving welfare entitlements directly into the bank accounts of beneficiaries, a weapon it unveiled in a small tehsil in Rajasthan in October 2012 to make an electoral offensive, is beginning to resemble a double-edged sword.
Direct benefit transfer (DBT) was one of the factors intended to rescue the party in the Rajasthan elections, held last December, but that does not seem to have happened. In the three Rajasthan districts where it launched DBT on January 1, 2013, or 11 months before the state went to polls, the Congress won just two out of the 27 seats on offer. If the experience of Rajasthan is anything to go by, a similar poor return of electoral capital from DBT awaits the Congress elsewhere.
The implementation problems that blunted DBT in Rajasthan, the original laboratory, are endemic across the country. "The benefits never reached the people," says Raghuvir Singh Meena, the Congress MP from Udaipur, of the experience of DBT in and around his constituency, which sends eight legislators to the Rajasthan assembly.
The benefits are not going down either in the rest of the country—DBT is currently being implemented in 121 districts in all—in the scale and sweep, or within the timelines, the Congress had envisioned.
A senior Central government official working on rural development, not wanting to be named, agrees with the premise of cash transfers, but is critical of the way it is being implemented. "There was an unseemly hurry," he says. "It was a big mistake to set these deadlines, when it was clear that the supporting factors were not in place."
Incomplete Linkages
The DBT process is essentially an assembly of two parts. The first part is the Aadhaar number, being issued by the Unique Identification Authority of India ( UIDAI) to every Indian. According to the 10-year progress report of the UPA, released at the prime minister's press conference earlier this month, 510 million Aadhaar numbers had been issued, but this has not necessarily cover all beneficiaries of welfare schemes. In Rajasthan, for example, the Aadhaar enrolment is 62%. "You and I do not need Aadhaar numbers," says the Central government official . "The people working on NREGA do. For them, it is transformational."
The second piece is the linkage of an Aadhaar number to a bank account number, which is the job of banks. So far, according to the same UPA progress report, only 40 million bank accounts had been seeded with this number. This leaves a lot of beneficiaries in the cracks.
The three districts where DBT was launched in Rajasthan—Ajmer, Alwar and Udaipur—shows the adverse impact of this incompleteness. Of the 325,590 registered beneficiaries present in these three districts, only 31% had an Aadhaar number and only 12% received DBT.
Dudu tehsil, in Jaipur district, was where the Congress, in a rally attended by all its top leaders, sounded the poll bugle. "Dudu was never the first choice for unveiling DBT," says a Jaipur-based state government official involved in planning and implementing the unveiling ceremony, not wanting to be named. "We had said Kheroda in Udaipur is the most favourable place, keeping in mind various things such as administrative preparedness for organising an event of that scale, Aadhaar enrolments status, number of beneficiaries, etc. Dudu was given only as an alternate option."
This official terms the choice of Dudu as a "political decision". Members of the Rajasthan Congress cite the influence Babulal Nagar, the MLA from Dudu then, had with Ashok Gehlot, the then chief minister. Before he was disgraced and imprisoned on charges of rape, in October 2013, Nagar was an important Congress leader representing the Scheduled Castes.
But, says the state official quoted earlier: "Dudu, as well as Jaipur district, do not have a particularly good Aadhaar coverage. At 61%, it has slightly improved in Aadhaar lately. But in 2012, it had not." In the assembly elections, the Congress fielded Nagar's brother Hazarilal Nagar, who lost to the BJP candidate by 33,720 votes.
Weak Coordination
According to an official of a bank involved in DBT implementation in Jaipur district, not wanting to be named, the initial plan was to implement all welfare schemes via DBT. "It could not be done because there was a paucity of data about the schemes—for instance, the list of beneficiaries in scholarship schemes were not fully available," he says. "The seeding with bank accounts had also not been done." Sujata Chaturvedi, deputy director (northern region) of UIDAI, finds the data claim absurd. "I do not believe that there can be no lists available," she says. "Before DBT, the schemes were being implemented by conventional methods.
For their implementation, some lists will obviously have been needed, even if some of them could be not genuine."
In Rajasthan, where three more districts were added from July 1, 2013 (Jhunjhunu, Pali and Kota), a decision was taken to implement DBT for LPG cylinder sales, the reasoning being that it would compel people to obtain Aadhaar numbers. "However, even the DBT scheme for LPG seems to be facing too many roadblocks, with the gas agencies, government departments and banks not coordinating well," the bank official says.
A senior UIDAI official who has a pulse on the all-India picture on DBTs says, on the condition of anonymity, that the problem is various arms of the government are not aligned in the DBT rollout.
"The principal secretaries of all welfare schemes running ministries resisted DBT implementation during its rollout," he says. "When the DBT division of the Planning Commission spoke with district collectors directly and got the list of beneficiaries, the secretaries of ministries refused to own up to the data. They did not cooperate in implementation."
Similarly, there were different issues with different states, this official adds. For instance, Andhra Pradesh, one of the states with high Aadhaar coverage (65%), refused to cooperate in implementation as it already had a system of electronic transfer in place that functioned well. In Rajasthan, when former chief minister Gehlot expanded the ambit of the health and pension schemes, he did not opt for the DBT route.
Last-Mile Issues
There have been other problems. "Seeding went too slowly," says the Central government official. "There are problems with the last mile. The banking correspondent model has serious problems.
It was also a mistake to make Aadhaar mandatory even when everyone did not have it." In schemes were DBT was being used, the patchy coverage in Rajasthan hurt. "Due to illiteracy, many people could not obtain their Aadhaar cards and welfare benefits promised to them via DBT by visiting banks or post offices, where they faced a lot of red tape," says Meena, the Udaipur MP.
|
|
"Since it was promoted so much, the promise and hope created by Aadhaar among Adivasis was belied and, among other reasons, it has added to a lot of discontent against the party and its government."
"One day, everyone will be happy that they did this," says the Central government official of DBT. "In that sense, all this hurry has done some good as well.
The creation of new architecture for welfare delivery has speeded up. We see that in the rate at which broadband has reached panchayats, in the acceleration of financial inclusion into rural India." For now, though, cash transfers are struggling for direction, and are unlikely to result in vote transfer for the party that took ownership of the idea but not its implementation.
