CHARITY BEGINS AT HOME
A digital benefits transfer scheme becomes a harbinger of change. Now e-governance has transformed rural Rajasthan
When Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje named a scheme in 2007 after Bhamashah, a man synonymous with charity (he gave his wealth to Maharana Pratap to aid the fight against Akbar), even she wouldn’t have thought how much it would transform governance a decade later. Initially, a direct benefit scheme for women where the state would deposit Rs 1,500 as seed money in each recipient’s bank account, today it’s a significant digital empowerment and governance programme. As Raje says, “It’s a gamechanger for the betterment of people.”
The numbers speak for themselves. Bhamashah’s beneficiaries include 61.5 million people out of a total population of 77 million in 2018 covering 16.7 million families. Officials cannot fudge the figures because the system has recorded the identity of every recipient and family with pho tographs and other markers. In all, Rs 2,300 crore has been credited into individual accounts of the beneficiaries of 54 schemes.
The government has meticulously integrated this enormous exercise to a larger governance model, largely reducing government officials’ interactions with the beneficiaries. The egovernance model covers 10,000 panchayats where the state has spent Rs 4 crore on an average, a figure which does not include the roads with drains constructed in the majority of villages in the past three years. Some sarpanches and even MLAs and ministers resisted the plan, but Raje pushed it through two years ago. It succeeded because the BJP government had made a certain level of school education compulsory along with onethird reservation for women in panchayat elections. The new panches are educated, many are young and the women constitute 58.293 per cent of them, making Rajasthan the second highest in the country in terms of rural representation of women.
The digitisation of rural Rajasthan has been an extension of the gradual buildup of 55,000 eMitra kiosks— mostly run by formerly unemployed youths—for 550 services. Today, eMitra handles a million transactions every day, from filling online forms and fees for driving licences to getting a reserved category certificate. This has meant considerable saving of time and money for the people and also hit grassroots corruption.
This success encouraged the implementation of the state’s health insurance scheme in December 2015. In three years, it has provided free hospitalisation to 2.7 million patients, paying bills worth Rs 1,952 crore.
The state has also shed its image of stereotyped bureaucratic hurdles in implementing Ease of Business and now stands third in India in the Reforms Evidence scorecard with 99.5 per cent compliance with an overall ninth position in India.