Indian government’s coronavirus aid is too little, too late
On March 26, while announcing the Rs 1.7 lakh crore relief package under the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Yojana, intended to protect the most vulnerable Indians, such as migrant workers, widows and poor pensioners, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman repeatedly emphasised that it had been deployed within 36 hours of the lockdown being announced. Nonetheless, this is a classic case of too little too late.
Had the package been rolled out before the lockdown, it may have mitigated the tragedy unfolding across the country. Over the past two days, millions of migrant workers have begun arduous treks from urban centres back to their villages and towns in labour-exporting states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, some faced with a journey of hundreds of kilometres on foot, forced to survive on just biscuits and water in that time.
This mass exodus echoes the tragedy of Partition, when millions of refugees were forced to travel across the country, and brings to mind Nobel laureate John Steinbeck’s iconic The Grapes of Wrath, in which hundreds of thousands of impoverished migrants trekked westward across America from drought-stricken Oklahoma to California. What’s worse is that this exodus may be the beginning of yet another tragedy — it carries the risk of the Covid-19 virus being transported to India’s hinterlands, perhaps to infect millions of rural families.
Even if one were to ignore the timing of its announcement, the package is surely a pie in the sky. The entire outlay works out to just about 1.15 per cent of India’s 2019-20 GDP (Rs 147.8 lakh crore). This expenditure is supposed to benefit 80 crore workers, almost two-thirds of India’s population. And though the entire package is fairly comprehensive — with two components, ‘Anna’ for food security and ‘Dhan’ for direct benefit transfers — a closer look at the package reveals that the individual-level benefits are a mere pittance.
Unpacking the Package
The food security package, aimed at ensuring that no person remains without food, includes the free distribution of an extra 5 kg of rice (or wheat) per person, and 1 kg of pulses, per family, for the next three months, over and above their existing entitlements. However, this amounts to just carbohydrates and some protein. No provision has been made for vegetables, fruits, vitamins and minerals, which are essential to keeping immunity levels high. This is crucial at a time when the Covid-19 virus is laying siege to entire communities.
The direct benefit package has several components, not all of which directly benefit citizens. For instance, the Rs 25,000 crore to be tapped from district mineral funds is solely for augmenting medical facilities and for testing, and will not benefit citizens as cash handouts or income support. For farmers, about Rs 17,380 crore has been allocated to assisting about 8.7 crore farmers, but this just means that the first instalment of the PM-Kisan Yojana funds due to farmers for 2020-21, about Rs 2,000, will be paid in April.
This amount had been announced before the Lok Sabha election in 2019 and there has been no increase in the entitlement on account of inflation. This basically amounts to a promise that farmers will get their first PM-Kisan instalment sooner, which is good, but is also unlikely to be of much help for a medical emergency.
Similarly, the MNREGA wage-rate increase of Rs 20 per day’s work is supposed to benefit about 13.62 crore families. In 2019-20, MNREGA generated 258 crore person-days of employment.
However, given the national lockdown, there is no guarantee that migrant labourers will be able to find daily jobs. A study by Tata Institute of Social Sciences suggests that an unemployment allowance to MNREGA job cardholders pegged to the minimum wage in each state would have done better in ensuring the safety and economic stability of workers in this period.
At the aggregate level, women Jan Dhan account holders are entitled to get Rs 10,000 crore via direct benefit transfers. However, at an individual level, it works out to Rs 500 per month for each Jan Dhan account holder. No thought was given to the fact that during a pandemic, the biometric verification itself would result in massive queues at banks, which already face alarming levels of a shortage of staff given the lockdown.
Agriculture secretary Ashok Dalwai, in-charge of the project to double farm incomes, sympathises with the problems faced by migrant workers and admits to “adjustment problems” but argues, “The PM Garib Kalyan Yojana is not a development package but merely an additional aid to provide food security and necessary relief and support to the poor.”
But at a time when China, reportedly emerging out of the Covid-19 crisis, is providing sanitised trains to migrant workers to return to cities from their homes, yet maintaining all standards of social distancing, and most western nations are providing massive stimulus packages to their poorer populations as unemployment incomes, the pie-in-the-sky promised to the poor in India will neither compensate them for their loss of income due to the lockdown, nor help mitigate the suffering of the vulnerable poor who are desperately searching for safety and security.
Also read: The great hoax of India