2 July 2018
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In January of 2013, I spent a month in the Sahayta Kendra at Khunti block, in Khunti district of Jharkhand. At that time, it was one of a couple of Sahayta Kendras in Jharkhand. Started by local activists initially focusing on Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), they are intended to be spaces where workers learn to help each other, collectivize and claim their entitlements.
In that short period of a month, the Kendra worked on three issues – a verification of official social security pension lists, a survey of the discontinuation of Mid-Day Meals in schools and pursuing a case of compensation for two MGNREGA workers. Five years later, a lot has changed for the better and some of the worse. It’s useful to reflect on this along three categories; the functioning of the schemes themselves, the robustness of macro accountability platforms and the growth of creative social accountability techniques at the grassroot level.
Starting off with social security pensions or the National Social Assistance Programme (NSAP). Our survey in Khunti district found that pensioners greatly value their pension although it is limited (then Rs. 400 per month, with Rs. 200 from the Central Government) . The major implementation issues were untimely disbursal and severe exclusion of eligible beneficiaries.
Since then, the pension amount in Jharkhand has now increased to Rs. 600. However it is not linked to inflation, so if and when it increases further is a guessing game. While the issues of erratic payments persist, a new affliction is the denial of payment due to errors in aadhaar seeding after the mandatory introduction of aadhaar and the use of the aadhaar enabled payment system for pension payments (more on this later).
There has been some traction to address the lack of universal coverage and low amounts. At the national level, the Sumit Bose Committee was set up by the Ministry of Rural Development to examine the use of the Socio Economic and Caste Census. This was an opportunity to universalize or at least expand coverage, as per the Ministry’s own guidelines. While it was widely reported in the media that the SECC will be used to identify NSAP beneficiaries, this hasn’t materialized. The Committee’s other recommendation that social security pensions be indexed to Consumer Price Index has also not been acted upon. The low amount continues to be a national embarrassment. Earlier this year 60 economists wrote a letter to the Finance Minister, as did Pension Parishad to the Prime Minister, to increase and index the pension amounts. These were ignored for yet another year of the annual budget.
In terms of the accountability platforms, the Ministry of Rural Development guidelines (issued in 2014) mandate the setting up of State Level Committee headed by the Chief Secretary or Additional Chief Secretary responsible for implementation, monitoring and evaluation. In Jharkhand at least there is no evidence or information to indicate that such a committee was constituted or functioning. The guidelines also mandate the conducting of social audits once every six months. In Jharkhand, there have been no social audits conducted on the NSAP yet.
In terms of social accountability, efforts were made to verify lists of pension beneficiaries. A small exercise conducted in July 2017 by Sahayta Kendras in two blocks showed the persistence of delays, regardless of the mode of disbursal. One progressive measure has been the notification of pension applications on 29 December 2015 under the Jharkhand Right to Public Service Act, 2011. This is a welcome measure as it creates an alternative route to applying for a pension, not solely with the implementing agency. However, as per the Government of Jharkhand reports on their website as of today , a grand total of nine applications have been processed by this system. At best, this shows the lack of data entry and seriousness of monitoring this system, and at worst it shows the non-operationalisation of a potentially useful provision.
Next the Government of Jharkhand on 7 September 2017 announced that 3 lakh fake pension accounts had been deleted with savings of Rs. 180 crores. Right to Information applications were filed asking for the list of these deleted pensioners and the reasons. The list of deleted pensioners was rejected under the Right to Information, citing the generic and convenient “privacy concerns.” Out of the RTI applications that were received, 94% of these were removed from the list for routine and legitimate reasons such as ‘deaths’ and ‘migrations.’ Only 6% could potentially be fraudulent. Even in this case, declaring them “fake” is incorrect. To make matters even more opaque, the Government of Jharkhand shut down its website on social security pensions towards the end of 2017.
Table 1: Information compiled from Right to Information Replies on number of “fake” pensioners for 2017-18
| S. No. | District | Fake/Ghost Beneficiary/ Duplicate Bank Account/ Duplicate Aadhaar |
% with potential wrongdoing | Death / Discontinue / Migrated / Other | % routine | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Sahibganj | 91 | 4 | 2099 | 96 | 2190 |
| 2 | Koderma | 450 | 40 | 666 | 60 | 1116 |
| 3 | Bokaro | 2 | 1 | 294 | 99 | 296 |
| 4 | Simdega | 537 | 65 | 283 | 35 | 820 |
| 5 | West Singhbum | 335 | 15 | 1833 | 85 | 2168 |
| 6 | Ranchi | 0 | 10612 | 100 | 10612 | |
| 7 | Palamu | 510 | 6 | 8545 | 94 | 9055 |
| Total | 1925 | 7 | 24332 | 93 | 26257 |
However, in two blocks where the Sahayta Kendras are active, Khunti and Manika, these lists of deleted pensioners were procured from the District and Block administration and a verification exercise was conducted. As per initial results, this verification showed that “fakes” make up a fraction of all those deleted which corroborates with the information from other districts. In this process many genuine beneficiaries have been excluded. This is a grave injustice where completely legitimate pensioners suddenly have their pensions stopped because they either failed to seed to aadhaar, or else there was an administrative error in aadhaar seeding. Furthermore, this is projected as a “saving”. Invariably, this affects the most vulnerable, for whom this scheme is a lifeline.
Overall, there is little to cheer about. At the national level, there has been no movement on two longstanding demands, of universalizing and increasing (and indexing) social security pensions. At the state level, accountability oversight mechanisms have not been operationalized. There have been significant losses for transparency. Even so, these small exercises by the Sahayta Kendra offer some hope in iterating peoples demands for accountability, to improve the functioning of the scheme that is important to them.
Reference:
[1] http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0973703020140103
[2] https://thewire.in/government/jharkhand-pensions-aadhar
[5] Pension Parishad is a national campaign consisting of various Civil Society Organisations and individuals across the country, which advocates for the rights of the elderly, including a universal and dignified pension for all.
[6] https://www.telegraphindia.com/india/old-age-pension-plea-to-modi-196611
[7] http://www.nsap.nic.in/Guidelines/nsap_guidelines_oct2014.pdf
[9] http://jhr2.nic.in/rtgs/frmservicewisereport.aspx
[10] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-43207964
[11] https://www.thequint.com/news/india/excluded-by-aadhaar-the-poor-who-are-denied-rations-and-pensions
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author, and don’t necessarily reflect the position of CBGA. You can reach Inayat Sabhikhi at inayat.sabhikhi@gmail.com.