Vulnerability is defined as “proneness to harm or damage originating from external forces”. According to a widely quoted description, vulnerable groups are: “groups that experience a higher risk of poverty and social exclusion than the general population.
Types of vulnerability
Physical Vulnerability: No ownership rights and entitlements for the Poor.
Economic Vulnerability: Erratic income because of informal employment with low wages makes them more vulnerable.
Social Vulnerability: Income inequality creates a divergence between lower strata of society i.e. the poor and middle class.
Personal Vulnerability: The poor are victims of all types of injustice and violence. Particularly, low-caste people and minorities, especially women, children, the elderly, the disabled and the destitute have no access to social justice.
Some of the vulnerable sections in India are
- Scheduled castes
- Scheduled tribes
- Minority
- Women (already covered)
- children
- elderly
- disabled
- LGBTQIA
- migrants
The rationale of a welfare scheme for vulnerable sections
The preamble of the Indian constitution: it seeks to ensure social, political and economic justice and equality of status and opportunity to all of its citizens.
- Fundamental rights: part three of the Indian constitution provides for various rights like the right to life, right to health, right to education, right against discrimination and exploitation etc.
- DPSPs: part four of the Indian constitution directs the state to ensure the welfare of the citizens through various measures like the redistribution of economic resources etc.
- Humanitarian grounds: these vulnerable sections need special assistance and care from the state for their well-being because without state help they will have to face many disadvantages and will not be able to avail fair and equal life choices as those enjoyed by other citizens.
- Economic imperative: to achieve the goal of inclusive growth we need to ensure the welfare of vulnerable sections so that they can participate in economic activities.
Significance of Welfare schemes
- Significantly reduces poverty, vulnerability, and inequality and supports social cohesion.
- Economic enabler contributing to robust, sustainable and inclusive economic growth. Raising household incomes, enhances consumption and savings, boosting aggregate demand.
- Increases productivity, skills and employability by enhancing human capabilities. Helps in realising the potential of Demographic dividends.
- Provision of public goods which leads to equity and justice in society. Ex. Education & Health for all.
- Welfare schemes help in enhancing people’s resilience in the face of shocks like natural disasters, pandemics or economic crises. Ex: Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan package (PMGKP) and MGNREGA during the COVID pandemic.
Limitations of welfare schemes
- Identification of beneficiaries: Welfare schemes often fail to target the intended beneficiaries due to several inclusion and exclusion errors. Ex: in PDS, there is a prevalence of ghost BPL cards. Some States have issued more ration cards than a number of households, while some have the problem of unidentified households.
- The status of the beneficiary is dynamic. Social protection aims to ensure that a person comes out of poverty at some point. But the absence of a continuous evaluation of schemes and their beneficiaries results in perpetually providing benefits to unintended beneficiaries.
- Corruption and leakages: Corruption and leakages lead to inefficiency in implementing schemes and fail to reach benefits to intended beneficiaries.
- Emphasis on outputs rather than outcomes: Output refers to the direct and measurable product of program activities, often expressed in physical terms or units. at the same time, Outcomes are collective results or qualitative improvements brought about in the delivery of these services. Ex: Construction of a school is ‘output’, while the increase in literacy rate is outcome or impact.
- Lack of awareness and participation of beneficiaries: Demand-driven and rights-based welfare schemes like PDS under NFSA or MGNREGA, can’t be implemented efficiently without awareness and participation of beneficiaries. This lack of awareness reduces vulnerable sections to mere beneficiaries rather than partners in the development process.
- It doesn’t address the structural issues: some welfare schemes are supposed to be temporary in nature till structural issues are resolved. But often populist welfare schemes become an end in themselves. Ex: MGNREGA was introduced to arrest distressed migration of rural people by assuring them of livelihoods. However, the MGNREGA scheme provides majorly unskilled manual work, it would neither result in the Skill development of rural labour nor provide sustainable employment opportunities to them.
- Hinders capacity building: Unlimited welfare schemes may disincentivize the beneficiaries to improve their capabilities and make them reliant upon govt benefits perpetually.
- The burden on the exchequer: A multitude of social welfare schemes, however, leads to a heavy burden on the exchequer and limits investments and job creation. Often, the private sector bears the brunt, owing to higher borrowing costs created by government spending on welfare measures.
- Infrastructural challenges: last-mile delivery challenges in DBT schemes due to inadequate digital infrastructure.
Steps to overcome these limitations
- Better targeting of beneficiaries:
- SECC was conducted to replace old below-poverty-line (BPL) lists to identify potential beneficiaries of government schemes better.
- Aadhaar provides a unique identity and is helpful in targeting the intended beneficiaries.
- Direct beneficiary transfers (DBT): DBTs are introduced to ensure correct funds are transferred to the right beneficiaries, reducing corruption & leakages in the system. Ex: JAM Trinity is used to providing LPG subsidy
- Use of technology in the implementation of welfare programs. Ex: GeoMGNREGA uses space technology to develop a database of assets created under MGNREGS using technological interventions like mobile-based photo geo-tagging and a GIS-based information system for online recording and monitoring. The data is in the public domain, ensuring transparency and public disclosure.
- Social audit: Social auditing has been mandated for the implementation of schemes like MGNREGA to increase transparency and people’s participation.
- Involving SHGs: SHGs are roped in to implement and monitor schemes like NRLM to increase transparency and awareness of beneficiaries about their entitlements.
- Introduction of Outcome-based budgeting: Outcome-based budgeting (OBB) is a method of budgeting that measures the progress of each department and ministry and what they have done with their allocated budget. Outcome budgeting makes government programmes more result oriented, instead of outlay oriented.
