World Bank gives $1 billion to India to aid social safety
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Clearly, everybody recognises the shock (from Covid). The choice is being said to be between lives and livelihoods. This is not a choice the govt of India is making.
JUNAID AHMAD, India director, World Bank
Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Yojana (PMGKY). It will immediately help scale up cash transfers and food benefits, using a core set of pre-existing national platforms and programmes such as the Public Distribution System (PDS) and Direct Benefit Transfers (DBT), the bank said.
Jobless migrant workers, hit by the lockdown, have fallen through the cracks because static social safety nets did not reach them in absence of portability.
“If World Bank wants to streamline our social safety nets, first off, they are getting into very complicated things. Issue sometimes is not so much about how to reach the people as it is about how to get two wings of government talking,” said economist Abhijit Sen, former member of the erstwhile Planning Commission.
The arguments are on two things, Sen said: “One, don’t overcentralise things. Where World Bank can intervene and should, is portability. Two, if I had to give out a billion dollars, then, I would give very little of that to federal govt and most of it to states; in fact, more to municipalities.”
Over 90% of India’s workforce is employed in the informal sector, without access to basic savings or pensions, or paid leave from work. “There are large transfers to the rural poor. Look at the PMGKY. The idea is to make social benefits such as food and cash transfers just as easily accessible for urban informal workers and migrants,” said World Bank lead of the project, Shrayana Bhattacharya.
NEWDELHI:THE World Bank unveiled a US $1-billion package to introduce a social safety system for the urban poor. In an interview to , Shrayana Bhattacharya, senior economist, World Bank, discusses its nuts and bolts.
Given the ongoing pandemic, the government needs to provide cash and in-kind support to the vulnerable. The programme envisages social protection as a bridge that can carry the poor and vulnerable to a phase of recovery. Half of India’s population is between the poverty line and twice the poverty line. Ninety per cent of workforce is informal. Our programme not only helps accelerate Indian govt’s attempt to support the poor, it is also trying to create strategic shifts that can not only help India deal with Covid-19 but also any future shocks or disasters.
There are three critical shifts. First, the programme will help India move from 460-plus fragmented social protection schemes to a fast and more flexible integrated system. Second, it will enable geographic portability of social benefits that can be accessed from anywhere in country, ensuring food, social insurance and cashsupport, including for migrants and urban poor; and finally, it will move social protection from a predominantly rural focus to pan-national one that recognises urban poor.
Nearly 70% of social protection beneficiaries are in rural India. But there’s a growing urban economy and also fair amount of mobility between rural to urban India. The needs of a more mobile and urban India haven’t been addressed. For example, for Covid crisis, the government was able to quickly use pre-existing schemes like PM-KISAN, available only in rural India. There is no urban equivalent of a MNREGA or PM-KISAN.
You need to be able to provide food in an immediate and a portable way across states. Scaling up One Nation, One Ration is essential and our programme will support that. The second is about creating a cash-delivery system so income transfers can reach urban India and assets exist -- like bank accounts and Aadhaar.