FRAGMENTED bureaucratic setup coupled with corruption and irregularities takes a toll on social safety net schemes, an English daily reported on Friday quoting opinion of the experts. We are also equally apprehensive of the existing social protection programmes as the spending under social safety nets is highly questionable in the light of huge misuse and exploitation on political grounds. The government is now annually spending around 2.5 percent of GDP on social safety nets through 90 social protection programmes operated by 20 ministries. But, political influence and anomalies have gripped the schemes raising questions of misappropriation and pilferage. Therefore, while finalising the much-needed national strategy on the social protection system, the government must categorically identify the beneficiaries and implementing agencies of the social protection projects.
Though budgetary allocation for the social safety schemes increases proportionately every year, the outcome does not match with the expectations. The obstacles mentioned in the reports are – non-transparent processes in targeting beneficiaries, absence of baseline information and good governance, abuse of political power and insufficient allocation which pose major challenges for the social protection schemes. While we support spending to provide greater safety to the marginalized vulnerable groups, but without properly targeting the beneficiaries it just remains a party programme confined to only power centric persons. It is more relevant as the government has taken the move to convert the food for work programme to cash for work. Here, the misuse and misappropriation of fund is at the center of the debate as cash is more easy to pilfer and distribute to political groups.
Therefore, discrimination of the beneficiaries on political grounds is often the ground reality. Moreover, using the resources to advance political causes and patronizing even well to do political workers with the fund is not something new. We suggest that the local government system be strengthened by making them truly elective to make its functionaries more transparent and accountable to the electorate when disbursing social safety net benefits. We are against misuse of taxpayers money and budgetary resources to that end and demand that the government keep the safety net issues above politics.
Wealth tax can be a weapon to finance the social protection system. A need for a special food rationing system for the workers of garment factories should be considered. There should be a guideline in provisioning budgetary allocations for the safety net schemes. Otherwise, nepotism and corruption will take hold of the efforts declared for the remedy of mass poverty. Thus, achieving MDGs will remain a far cry only due to political misappropriation.
