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While presenting the first Budget of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party government in 2014, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had remarked that the budget is the most comprehensive action plan of a government. The new India envisioned, would focus on rural development, employment through infrastructure creation and provision of quality public services by 2022.
IndiaSpends’ conclusion is based on the comparison of allocations for flagship welfare schemes between 2018-19 and the newly announced interim budget.
The interim budget for rural development department saw only a 5% increase from the revised estimates of 2018-19, which remained unchanged despite a Rs 4,000 crore increase for Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS).
A breakdown of schemes-wise allocations puts this change in perspective. The allocations for the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (prime minister’s rural roads programme), in terms of budget estimates, have remained constant since 2016 at Rs 19,000 crore.
With expenditure on the scheme, including payments due, already at Rs 65,355 crore, and 2.04 billion person-days of work generated till date (out of a target of 2.3 billion), this allocation is unlikely to relieve rural distress.
Similarly, allocations for the Pradhan Mantri Awaas Yojana (PMAY-G, prime minister’s rural housing scheme) decreased by 13% in the revised estimates for 2018-19 and another 5% this year. This is despite allocations being less than the minimum requirement:
This shortage is reflected in the delays in payments to beneficiaries. Of the beneficiaries who had completed construction between April 2014 and 31 December 2018, 1.04 million were yet to receive their final installment, Accountability Initiative found. With another 3.64 million houses to be completed and inspected between January 2019 and March 2019, it remains to be seen if government will meet its 10-million target.
The government’s health strategy has broadly focused on three things – ensuring free drugs and diagnostics, creating health and wellness centres (HWCs) to reinvigorate the failing rural health infrastructure evident from Rural Health Statistics 2018 and addressing the shifting of disease burden to non-communicable diseases and finally, covering 107 million poor families with an insurance cover of Rs 5 lakh for inpatient care under the Ayushman Bharat scheme.
The interim budget brings good news for Ayushman Bharat with allocations increasing to Rs 8,000 crore from Rs 3,600 crore in 2018-19 revised estimates. However, this comes at a cost, as IndiaSpend predicted:
“The lack of the financial commitment for translating healthcare goals into action is evident from the fact that though the government expenditure on health sector has marginally increased as a percent of GDP [gross domestic product] over the years, it has stagnated at around 1.2% of GDP and the current pace of the year-on-year budgetary allocation for health is unlikely to reach the targeted level of 2.5% of the GDP by 2025,” the 106th Demand for Grants report of the department of health and family welfare had remarked in March 2018.
The inadequate increase is likely to affect expansion and strengthening of health facilities to meet norms and the implementation of new interventions, the report further warned.
The increasing allocations since 2014 for Swachh Bharat have come at the cost of drinking water. India faces the worst crisis in its history with nearly 600 million Indians facing high-to-extreme water stress, and 21 Indian cities set to run out of groundwater by 2020.
After many years of prioritising allocations for sanitation, it was expected that the interim budget (or at least the revised allocations for 2018-19) would finally indicate a shift. With government data reporting 92 million toilets already built, the decline in Swachh Bharat Mission-Gramin allocations was expected. Yet, surprisingly, allocations for the National Rural Drinking Water Programme (NRDWP) have not changed significantly.
The government’s own data show that only 44% of rural habitations are provided drinking water at 55 litres per capita per day (lpcd) as on January 1, 2019, up from 43% in 2014-15, reported Accountability Initiative. India’s commitment of ensuring piped water supply to 80% households by 2020 remains elusive given that coverage was only 18% as on 31 December 2018.
Child and maternal malnutrition continues to be India’s leading risk factor in 24 out of 30 states for which data were available, as per the ‘India: Health of the Nation’s States’ report. India’s answer to this has been in the form of the decades-old scheme – the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) – and maternity benefits in the form of the Pradhan Mantri Matru Vandana Yojana (PMMVY, prime minister’s maternal welfare scheme).
While the 2018-19 figures remain below the amount projected by the ministry of women and child development of Rs 18,007 crore, the latest allocations are a much-needed boost to a sector which has seen a decline in the number of beneficiaries getting supplementary nutrition.
In contrast, the maternity benefit scheme – a legal entitlement for all women (except those already covered in the formal sector) under the National Food Security Act 2013 – has seen a mixed picture. In 2017, the government launched PMMVY to provide a cash benefit of Rs 5,000 to pregnant women after meeting certain antenatal care conditionalities. The scheme was later restricted to the first live birth.
With allocations in the interim budget below even the 2017-18 numbers, a scheme already criticised for its under-funding will be further squeezed.
(This article was first published in IndiaSpend and was republished with permission)
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