Govt maange more from job, health schemes

Highlighting the social sector’s tainted past of high expenditure and poor outcome, the economic survey has sought revamp of Centre’s flagship programmes for providing jobs, health and educational security to ensure better delivery and effective utilisation of funds.

Updated on: Jul 10, 2014, 09:39:19 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Highlighting the social sector’s tainted past of high expenditure and poor outcome, the economic survey has sought revamp of Centre’s flagship programmes for providing jobs, health and educational security to ensure better delivery and effective utilisation of funds.

The survey calls for an overhaul at the time when the government is considering changes in several social sector schemes, including Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), amid growing clamour to rejig the programmes for better productivity. Poised on the edge of a cliff

India since 2008-09 — except in 2011-12 — has allocated nearly one-fourth of the public money for social sector services (Rs 12, 00,000 crore), but still finds itself at the lower ebb of the global human development index. As a result, leading economists question its aim for high growth without adequate trickle-down effect for the poor.

The country’s ranking as per the United Nation’s latest human development report was 134 among the 187 countries in 2012, even lower than countries like South Africa, Indonesia and Sri Lanka which witnessed lesser economic growth than India.

“The existing gap in health and education indicators in India as compared to several developed and developing countries highlights the need for development of basic health and education at a much faster pace,” the survey said. In both health and education, the survey has sought major changes.

It wants the provision of having a school within a kilometre of a habitation in the Right to Education (RTE) Act to be revisited saying it has led to mushrooming of schools with infrastructure in the form of building getting wasted.

“A single and bigger school for nearby places could serve the purpose better,” the survey said, while asking the government to introduce “outcome-based assessment of teachers”. RTE is being implemented through Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan.

The survey also argued for a Public Private Partnership with “careful regulatory oversight” to ensure affordable health for rural India. A major flaw cited in the government’s National Rural Health Mission was under-utilisation of well-built infrastructure primarily because of inadequate health personnel.

But, the biggest overhaul the survey wants is in the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, as more than `2, 00,000 crore have been spent since its implementation in 2006.

Saying many of its provisions were not realistic, the survey pointed out that the need for community projects has saturated as they have been completed with other public funds, low wages were not attracting productive labour and emphasis has shifted to building assets on land of beneficiaries rather than community.

“There was an urgent need to revamp MGNREGA to prevent its misuse and make it a development-oriented programme creating tangible and meaningful assets and infrastructure including tourism,” the survey said.

On the broad aim for the revamp, the survey said: “A mere mark-up each year in the budget for existing programmes or starting new programmes will not suffice. What is needed is a ‘zero-budgeting approach’ with a revamp, reorganisation and convergence of social sector schemes with a minimum size prescribed for the schemes.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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