Admitting that lion’s share of the money meant for alleviating the hardships of poverty-ridden masses are getting siphoned off due to corruption, noted economist Jean Dreze advocated strongly for continuation of the schemes meant for the deprived sections. He instead suggested measures like stronger legislations in place and interventions from technology to curb the pilferages.
“Media tends to cover horror stories related to social welfare schemes. You often see headlines about poor quality of mid-day meal or children gotten ill due to lizard falling into it. This is obvious but it often overshadows good works happening around. Corruption is there amid all this mess but we cannot do away with welfare measures taken to support poorest of the poor in the society,” said Dreze. He was delivering a lecture on Wednesday on ‘Public Action and India’s Great Escape’ at St Xavier College.
He, to drive home his point, hit at slowcoach India when it comes to social indicators even in comparison of the countries like Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri lanka. “In the last 60 years many changes have taken place but on social indicators India is way-way behind countries like Vietnam, Bangladesh and even sub-Saharan Africa. Along with elementary education, life expectancy, health care, land reforms real wages has not gone up in respect of China. China has seen 7 per cent growth rate in terms of real wages in manufacturing while India would be around 2.4,” he added.
Co-author of many books related to poverty and hunger with Nobel laureate Amartya Sen; Jean Dreze also critised hue and cry over wages going up after NREGA has come. “NREGA has improved real wages in agriculture little bit but panic is there. It is being signified as economic boom which is not the case. India has far much GDP than Bangladesh and Nepal but low on social indicators like child immunization, supply of vitamin A, ORS to diarrhea hit children and the practice of open defecation. Percentage of person defecating in open in Bangladesh is just 7.5 while in India it is 50 per cent,” he said expressing surprise over the figures and also termed it ‘the great Indian enigma’.
He expressed hope that legislations like RTI and infusion of technology like biometrics, GPS etc to plug leakages besides increasing awareness level. “Things are changing in Jharkhand as well though slowly and now we have a better PDS system than before. PDS was prone to corruption earlier in Chhattisgarh but it is functioning well now with these interventions,” he said.
Dreze also cautioned against the elusion which suggests that India as a welfare State has gone too far and thus it should roll back and termed it a great worry while underlining the percentages of GDP spent in vital areas of human development indices.