India: Endless Wait of 60 million Senior Citizens for Pensions | Bharat Dogra

 

Endless Wait of 60 million Senior Citizens for Pensions

Bharat Dogra

The most important support needed by elderly persons is for regular and adequate pensions. Only about 10 per cent of senior citizens in India have access to regular and reasonable pensions. They are mostly those who have served in the civil government, armed forces and related parts of the formal sector. For the remaining over 90 per cent of senior citizens, pensions either do not exist, or else are irregular, uncertain or extremely inadequate.

 The pensions for this unorganized sector are provided mainly by the National Social Assistance Program or NSAP (and to a lesser extent by some other programs). Out of the nearly 82 million elderly citizens in this informal sector, this scheme of the Union Government manages to reach just about 22 million people. Many eligible and selected  persons have been denied pension due to insistence on Aadhar and biometric recognition, various irregularities and other factors. Thus around 60 million elderly people are still waiting to get any pension. There are separate pension schemes for widows under NSAP.

This scheme of the Union Government distinguishes between two age groups of elderly citizens—60 to 79 years and 80 years onwards. In the second age-group the Union government provides Rs. 500 per month per person. However the overwhelming majority of the elderly people are in the former age-group. For this age group the contribution of the Union government is just Rs. 200 per month.

 At a time when  highly dubious projects worth tens of thousands of crores have been cleared without much thought and huge income raises are provided to senior officials and politicians as a routine matter, when the number of billionaires in the country is higher than ever before, the pension offered to most elderly citizens who toiled from morning to night as farmers and workers for at least four decades by the union government is just Rs. 200 per month.

 This was fixed about a decade back and has not been changed since then despite many demands, protests and recommendations to increase this. During this period the value of this amount in present day prices has dwindled to just about Rs. 85 or so.

To this amount provided by the union government the state government generally adds a contribution of its own under this scheme. In some of the smaller states like Goa, Kerala and Delhi the state governments for a long time have been making a significant contribution so that the selected elderly citizens (not all elderly citizens) in these few states are able to get a higher pension than in most other states, but this is available to only a few compared to the national level numbers.

 In several states with much higher population of elderly citizens the contribution of the state government is also very small. For example in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar the pension under this scheme even after adding the state contribution is extremely less.

 So on the one hand about 60 million elderly people are not getting any pension and on the other hand most of them who manage to get a pension get a very meager amount. Even these pensions often do not reach them in time and many of these elderly persons have to spend a lot of effort and often some money to obtain their pension.

Their problems increased significantly after the introduction of Aadhar and biometrics based identification. The system of grievance removal which exists today leaves much to be desired and it is difficult for elderly people to get prompt action on their complaints. Pensions of several elderly persons are sometimes stopped arbitrarily and they keep running from pillar to post to renew them.

A justice-based solution, which is workable within existing  fiscal constraints,  is to provide at least one half of the minimum legal wage to all senior citizens. This should be unconditional for all except those in a very high wealth and income slab, without the recipient contributing to this. Those who are getting higher pensions under various provisions will continue to do so.

In practical terms what this means is that if the legal minimum wage is Rs. 300 per day, then an elderly person will get a pension of Rs. 4500 per month, and a couple will get Rs. 9000.

 This objective can be achieved if the Indira Gandhi National Social Assistance Program can get an allocation of around 1.80 per cent of GNP (compared to about 0.03 per cent which it gets today). Considering that allocations for this program have not been raised for a long time, this demand should get priority attention.

The writer is Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include A Day in 2071 and India’s Quest for Sustainable Farming and Healthy Food.    

India: When people are hungry and feeble, they are not well placed to revolt - Jean Drèze

The Caravan

When people are hungry and feeble, they are not well placed to revolt: Jean Drèze

The Caravan

30 March 2020

Jean Drèze, an economist, during a conference in Delhi in August 2019. According to him, to deal with the COVID-19 lockdown, “We need an emergency facility in every state where people can go and get some food on the spot, without having to show ration cards or any documents.”

Anushree Fadnavis / REUTERS 

 

Hundreds of thousands of migrant workers and scores of poor people were left in the lurch on the night of 24 March, when the prime minister Narendra Modi announced a 21-day lockdown to combat COVID-19. The lockdown, which began within four hours, forced migrant workers to leave urban dwellings and make their way back home, without any state assistance. It led to an almost-complete destruction of economic activity across the country, with trillions of rupees wiped out in a market crash.
On the second day of the lockdown, the union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced a relief package of Rs 1.70 lakh crore under the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Yojana to provide the poor with food and funds in their bank accounts. Several experts have criticised the government for it. In a letter to the central and state governments, 635 people—including prominent academics, civil society activists, and policy analysts—appealed for a minimal set of emergency measures to deal with the crisis. According to them, the relief package of Rs 1.70 lakh crore is less than half the amount required to fulfil the minimal emergency-measures.
Among the people who endorsed the letter was Jean Drèze, an economist and activist who works as a visiting professor at Ranchi University. In a conversation with Kaushal Shroff, a staff writer at The Caravan, Drèze spoke about how in the coming days, access to food and earnings for poor people would rely on the functioning of our public-distribution system, which is under tremendous stress.
We do not know when the COVID-19 crisis will subside. It may last for months, even one year. Its economic impact will depend on how long the threat of the virus will last. In the best-case scenario, even if the health crisis subsides in a few weeks, the human costs will still be enormous but the economy may recover fairly quickly after that. If the crisis lasts much longer, with periodic lockdowns of varying intensity, the economy is likely to go downhill because there are going to be ripple effects. Businesses will go bankrupt. Then, banks will suffer because they will not be able to recover their loans and we may see a financial crisis. Meanwhile, health services will be overwhelmed, and perhaps other essential services too. It is a pretty frightening situation, both economically and in terms of the humanitarian impact.

Socially, all kinds of pathologies may develop if the crisis lasts. For instance, as people get scared, residential colonies will barricade themselves, expel persons suspected of infection, or there may be food riots—all kinds of things. Let’s hope that it does not go on for too long.
In the short term, a lot depends on whether the public-distribution system continues to function. The PDS can prevent hunger to a large extent, but it is under tremendous stress. The system does not function in a vacuum, it depends on the rest of the economy to keep the food moving. If the food is to move, you need transport, communications, spare parts, oversight, a working administration and so on. It is going to be difficult to ensure that the system delivers adequately in this situation.

In a worst-case scenario, where the PDS breaks down in some areas, there may be food riots. Except that India, for some reason, is a country where people do not do that sort of thing easily. Even the migrant workers you have seen on the television screens for the last few days—you sometimes wonder why they are not raiding the godowns or the local shops. Poor people are used to taking a lot of things lying down—when people are hungry and feeble, they are not necessarily well placed to revolt. But food riots could happen, who knows.
The lockdown is already turning into a humanitarian disaster. Transferring money through Pradhan Mantri Kisan Yojana, pensions, et cetera will take time. Even if the transfers are made quickly, people are unable to go to the bank right now. When they are allowed to go, banks may be overwhelmed, as they were after demonetisation.
The government should immediately release food stocks. It has huge food stocks. What is preventing it from releasing those stocks? There are nearly sixty million tonnes of wheat and rice in the godowns of the Food Corporation of India—that’s just before the wheat harvest, when the stocks normally rise further, sometimes up to eight million tonnes or so. That’s more than three times the buffer-stock norms, the level of stock that is sufficient to meet the operational requirement of foodgrains and exigencies at any point of time. Releasing this could ensure that there are food-distribution centres all over the place.
There are always people, starting with migrant workers, who fall through the cracks of the established social-security schemes. We need an emergency facility in every state where people can go and get some food on the spot, without having to show ration cards or any documents. It is sad to return to the nineteenth-century methods of famine relief that were later replaced with more dignified public works, and then with the public-distribution system. But I don’t see any other way of preventing starvation for now.
As told to Kaushal Shroff.