The Indian government has decided to go full steam ahead with its plans to disburse public distribution system aid in the form of cash rather than food. The government plans to have the cash deposited in the bank accounts of intended recipients and the system is supposed to make use of electronic Aadhar cards. A comprehensive food security framework that ensures adequate nutrition to all deprived and vulnerable sections of Indian society has not been implemented yet. But the government is busy publicizing the detailed manner in which it intends to disburse PDS aid. As far as the poor are concerned, the actual allocation of aid matters way more than the exact manner in which the food reaches them. This obvious fact seems to be lost on the Indian government.
A large proportion of the Indian population is still illiterate. Any PDS system that the government runs should be made intuitively easy for all Indians to understand, even those with no or limited literacy. Experts in human-machine interactions and experts in governance can try to determine if direct food disbursement or non-electronic cash disbursement or electronic cash disbursement will work better in the current Indian context. May be the Indian government should hire such experts and form a committee comprising some of them to recommend the best way to disburse aid. For cash disbursement, careful thought should be devoted to determine if traditional non-electronic banking or electronic banking is better suited in the current Indian context, where massive development challenges still remain and where literacy rates are still not at rich country standards. As for corruption, a lot depends on the people running the system and electronic systems cannot be expected to be immune to corruption. The fanfare with which the government is going about its attempts to introduce the electronic scheme while crucial questions about the storage and distribution of foodgrains remain and while lack of literacy hobbles large segments of the population is an example of the superficiality that has crept into government policies in recent times.
by C. Jayant Praharaj ( send comments to [email protected] )
A large proportion of the Indian population is still illiterate. Any PDS system that the government runs should be made intuitively easy for all Indians to understand, even those with no or limited literacy. Experts in human-machine interactions and experts in governance can try to determine if direct food disbursement or non-electronic cash disbursement or electronic cash disbursement will work better in the current Indian context. May be the Indian government should hire such experts and form a committee comprising some of them to recommend the best way to disburse aid. For cash disbursement, careful thought should be devoted to determine if traditional non-electronic banking or electronic banking is better suited in the current Indian context, where massive development challenges still remain and where literacy rates are still not at rich country standards. As for corruption, a lot depends on the people running the system and electronic systems cannot be expected to be immune to corruption. The fanfare with which the government is going about its attempts to introduce the electronic scheme while crucial questions about the storage and distribution of foodgrains remain and while lack of literacy hobbles large segments of the population is an example of the superficiality that has crept into government policies in recent times.
by C. Jayant Praharaj ( send comments to [email protected] )