A recent CAG sample survey report stated that only 3.2% of the target households of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme have benefited from the scheme. This means that 96.8% of the corpus spent on this most ambitious social sector scheme launched in Independent India’s history, might be going down the drain. Even though it was only a sample study and its results can not not be uniformly extrapolated, the statistics are still staggering. Decades after the famous confession of the then neophyte Rajiv Gandhi that for every Rupee spent by the government, only 15 paise reaches its intended recipients, things have only gotten worse. Subsequent studies have shown that the average utilisation figure may be still lower at around 6% only. Slowly but surely, the veneer of public good that’s draped around all government schemes is now coming off and the ‘emperor stands exposed with no clothes  on’.  All the rhetoric about caring for the poor is just that – rhetoric. These schemes are nothing but ingenuous machinations of the politicians, by the bureaucrats for their cronies. Government spending in India has become the fountainhead of corruption and any benefits to the needy sections of society is largely cosmetic and unintended.

If things have to improve, more and more technology needs to be brought into the distribution process. Technology can be used to better target subsidies and ensure transparency. Those of us who had earlier faced the travails of booking a seat in the pre-computerisation era would appreciate the sheer magic of computerised reservation system. More recently the role of technology has again been highlighted in the successful use of Electronic Voting Machines, in elections. There are various technologies available such as – biometric identification, smart cards, direct account credit, payment through mobile, internet – that can all be used to rationalise how subsidies are distributed. Many of these technologies have already been tried in piecemeal manner. But it needs to be taken up nationally on a war footing.

An august beginning in this direction has been made by the appointment of Nandan Nilekani to head the new Unique Identification Authority of India. He has been the prime votary of greater use of technology in targeting of subsidies for the past many years. Government has done well to appoint him to ‘put his money(effort) where his mouth is’. It will now need to back him with its unflinching commitment so that he can weather the displeasure of the entrenched classes and pursue the goal with a demonic zeal. A unique ID to all its citizens that encompasses the various forms of identification used currently can become the basis of targeting subsidies to the needy sections of society instead of wasting them on a broader spectrum. It can then usher in an even greater role of technology in subsidy distribution. The challenges before Nilekani are manifold, as demonstrated by the horde of systemic problems that plague the present sectoral ID issuance such as Ration Card, BPL Card, Passport, PAN Card, Voter ID  , Driving License etc . However the problems are not insurmountable if a concerted, national effort is made with appropriate technological and people management inputs.

The greater use of technology should also be backed by a sustained publicity campaign to educate local communities to take advantage of the RTI Act in tracking the progress of various schemes in their locality. There is no reason to doubt that we can’t do all this successfully. We have already done it in case of railway reservation computerisation and EVM elections, both of which seemed equally intractable at the time of their implementation.

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