One of the many contentions between West Bengal’s ruling Trinamool Congress and the BJP has been the implementation of central government schemes in the state.
Most recently, the Trinamool Congress attacked the Centre for ignoring Bengal in the Rs 50,000-crore Garib Kalyan Rojgaar Abhiyaan, launched to create work for migrant workers, dealing with unemployment due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The 125-day Abhiyaan, starting 20 June, has been launched in 116 districts across six states. West Bengal, despite having reportedly received over 1 million returnee migrants over the course of the pandemic, is not one of these six states.
Out of the six in the list- Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Jharkhand and Odisha- three are NDA ruled states.
In response, the BJP said that the state government had not provided the Centre a district wise list of the migrants in each state. More importantly, it continuously pointed out that the West Bengal government had opted out of central schemes like Ayushmaan Bharat and PM-KISAN.
In case of both schemes, the Bengal government has said that it has “better” state-run schemes in place.
So who is correct in this case?
To ascertain this, we compared the PM-KISAN and Ayushmaan Bharat with the corresponding schemes in West Bengal. We also examined if the Garib Kalyan Rojgaar Abhiyaan can be considered in the same category as the two other central schemes.
PM-KISAN Vs Krishak Bandhu
Launched in the Interim budget of February 2019, right before the Lok Sabha elections the same year, the Pradhan Mantri Kisaan Sammaan Nidhi (PM-KISAN) is a 100 percent centrally funded scheme that gives minimum income support of 6,000 rupees a year to marginal and small farmer families having combined land holdings/ownership of up to 2 hectares.
The 6,000 rupees is disbursed in three equal installments and is to be directly transferred to the bank accounts of the beneficiaries.
Similarly, with the elections in mind, the Trinamool Congress government launched the Krishak Bandhu scheme on 31 December 2018, as a “New Year gift” to all farmers. The state-funded, approximately 3,000 crore rupees scheme, gives annual financial assistance of 5,000 rupees per acre to farmer families, disbursed in two installments- during the rabi and kharif seasons.
However, the Krishak Bandhu scheme also had a second part in the form of an assurance model. Under this, if a farmer, aged between 18 and 60, died (due to natural or unnatural causes), then their family was entitled to a one-time grant of two-lakh rupees.
Both aspects of the scheme, the state government said, would be rolled out to 72 lakh farmer families in West Bengal.
Therefore, Krishak Bandhu offers more financial benefits than PM-KISAN, apart from also being an assurance scheme for farmers.
With PM KISAN, the states and Union territories, had to assess the farmer families eligible and provide data to the centre. Soon after, the scheme was announced, the West Bengal government refused to roll it out.
In February 2020, however, Union Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh Tomar, while appealing to the West Bengal government to join the scheme said that almost 10 lakh of the 70 lakh farmers in the state had registered for the PM-KISAN scheme. Since then various BJP leaders, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, have harped on how they “cannot help” the farmers in the state, because Mamata Banerjee would not verify their data.
West Bengal is losing approximately Rs 42,000 crore in central funding by opting out of PM-KISAN.
Ayushmaan Bharat Vs Swasthya Sathi
The Ayushman Bharat Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Scheme (PM-JAY) is a flagship scheme of the BJP government and was launched in September 2018 with the aim to provide a health cover of 5 lakh rupees per family per year for secondary and tertiary care hospitalization to over 10 crore poor families that form “the bottom 40 percent of the Indian population”.
The bone of contention for the West Bengal government was the ratio of contribution towards premium between Centre and State which is at 60:40 in all States except the North Eastern States and the three Himalayan States, where the ratio is 90:10.
The government, once again, said that it had its flagship scheme Swasthya Sathi, in place since 2016, which was “better” than Ayushmaan Bharat and it would, therefore, not like to invest in an additional scheme.
The Swasthya Sathi scheme gives secondary and tertiary healthcare cover of upto 5 lakhs per year per family, on a paperless, cashless, smart-card enabled basis. The USP of the scheme, according to the government, is that the smart card for the scheme is issued in the name of the female head of the family.
The Swasthya Sathi website of the West Bengal government says that 75 million people (about 85 percent of the state’s population) have been covered by the scheme till date, with about 1.17 million beneficiaries.
In comparison, in May 2020, the Prime Minister announced that the number of beneficiaries under Ayushmaan Bharat had now reached 1 crore. When launched, the government said that it aimed to reach 50 crore people through the scheme.
Apart from West Bengal, Delhi, Odisha, Kerala and Punjab have also not signed up for the scheme.
Political "Scheme"-ing
It must be noted that the schemes that the Bengal government decided to opt out of were long-term schemes, requiring large-scale, systematic implementation. In contrast, the Garib Kalyan Rojgaar Abhiyaan is a 125-day, short-term scheme rolled out expressly to tackle the migrant crisis that has arisen from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Does the BJP’s argument, that the Bengal government did not participate in these long-term schemes and hence was not considered for the COVID sop, therefore, justified?
Former bureaucrat and political analyst Jawhar Sircar says that there’s also a larger messaging behind the launch of these schemes.
“Earlier central schemes were named after say an Indira Gandhi or a Mahatma Gandhi. Now everything is ‘PM’, making it seem, in terms of optics, that everything is being done by the Prime Minister”, says Sircar.
He further says that each central scheme that the state has to implement comes with a “price tag”.
“I may not have the funds to invest into a central scheme. In that case, why should I take the central government’s offer? Especially when I already have existing schemes that already serve the same purpose”, he tells The Quint.
He, however, says that sometimes there’s a bit of “stubbornness” from the state government also, to not implement a tried and tested scheme just because it gives credit to an opposing political party at the centre.
“But that does not hold true for this situation. This is mean-ness, if one can call it that. It is a ‘I deprive your people’, ‘You deprive my people’, sort of political situation in the middle of a crisis. And it is just not on”, Sircar concludes.
As the elections get closer, the BJP is expected to bring up the state government’s cold shoulder to these schemes as an example of Mamata’s “apathy”. In a state where the Chief Minister too is known for her political messaging through state-sponsored schemes, it is definitely a battle of equals.
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