Opinion
India needs a reliable database to aim its welfare schemes better
Summary
- We need a clear picture of India's have-nots. Without an up-to-date database that's accurate, governments will find it hard to reach households in need of state support.
Of every rupee spent in the name of the poor, only 15 paise goes to poor households, former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi once observed, drawing attention to widespread leakages in India’s welfare programmes. The Indian state’s welfare delivery apparatus has improved a lot since then, much of it over the past decade. Even critics of Prime Minister Narendra Modi acknowledge his government’s ability to aim welfare spending towards the deserving.
How did the government learn to identify deserving beneficiaries better? The answer lies in a caste census conducted by the Manmohan Singh government. Almost all of the Modi government’s flagship welfare schemes derive their list of beneficiaries from the Socio-Economic Caste Census (SECC) conducted in 2011. Beyond caste, the SECC contains a vast trove of data on household earnings, assets and amenities. So, depending on the state of your house in 2011 (for instance, whether it had a kuchcha or pucca wall), your occupational category, or your caste (Scheduled Caste or general category), your family may be automatically included or excluded from certain schemes.
In the pre-SECC era, welfare schemes were run on the basis of below-poverty-line (BPL) lists compiled by local authorities. Inclusion or exclusion from these lists was often influenced by local political activists who could get you enlisted if you paid the right price (a bribe). Hence, both inclusion errors (non-deserving households that became beneficiaries) and exclusion errors (poor households that could not become beneficiaries) were very high. While the Planning Commission would compute state-level poverty numbers using a nationally representative survey conducted by the ministry of statistics and programme implementation (Mospi), the actual identification of beneficiaries in each state was based on controversial BPL lists.
The SECC was conducted jointly by the Union and state governments, and the rural data was published online during the early phase of the exercise. Greater transparency and a more vigilant set of officials ensured that the database was robust in comparison with the old BPL lists. To be sure, the SECC had its share of problems. But everyone in the policy ecosystem—politicians, bureaucrats and policy wonks—agreed that the SECC database was a huge improvement over the old system based on problematic BPL lists. No wonder then that SECC-based welfare schemes have been more popular than their leaky predecessors.
However, the very success of the SECC has created hurdles in updating the database. Any attempt at updating it might lead respondents to overstate their deprivation levels now. Government officials are not sure they will be able to collect accurate data on the same parameters as before. This is one reason (apart from the postponement of the 2021 census) why the government has continued to use out-of-date SECC numbers even in 2024.
Even in 2011, the SECC may have overstated deprivation levels to some extent. A Mint analysis (‘The targeting challenge in India’s welfare programs’, 8 May 2019) showed that the 2011 census and SECC produced very different rankings of districts based on asset deprivation. The census-based deprivation rankings were far closer to deprivation rankings based on the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) 2015-16, even though the NFHS and census were conducted five years apart. Government officials fear that SECC 2.0 could end up being much less accurate than SECC 1.0.
While the Union government has dragged its feet on updating its main welfare database, state governments have gone ahead with their own socio-economic (and caste) surveys. They are facing their own share of problems. Within a few years, their databases become unreliable, and it gets difficult to identify deserving beneficiaries solely on the basis of their surveys. Attempts at using administrative data-sets to update the beneficiary databases haven’t been successful, according to a policy consultant advising state governments.
Some state governments have turned to party activists to help fill the gaps in their beneficiary database. These booth-level workers run quick-and-dirty surveys to update the official database. This ‘jugaad’ or workaround brings back the same problems that afflicted BPL lists: political biases and corruption in beneficiary selection. Others have tried to hide behind ‘algorithms.’ These run on flawed and incomplete data-sets, and also end up with biased results.
India’s welfare delivery model stands at a crossroads today. The public debate on poverty tends to centre on the poverty line and ways to measure it accurately. But we need to start paying more attention to how poor beneficiaries get identified. Even with a universally-agreed definition of poverty, governments will still need granular data on household characteristics to be able to reach poor households. They will also need to find a way to update such data regularly, so that a household that escapes poverty is eased out of the social security net, while one that becomes poor is included.
Without a reliable and dynamic database, governments will find it hard to reach the poorest of households in need of state support. They will have to either rely on extra-official agents to help identify the poorest lot, or devise quasi-universal schemes to cut down exclusion errors. After a decade of rapid progress in welfare delivery, India may be headed back to the pre-SECC era.
