Demonetisation: Giving JAM to the starving

The intended economic empowerment of the poor has been impeded by poor implementation

Sanjay crouches on a chair, eyes vacant and bank passbook in hand. “Could you please read my passbook and see if my pension has been deposited in my account?” the illiterate 28-year-old asks. “My mother takes me to the bank but she can’t read, either.”

 A resident of Jagdamba Camp, a south Delhi slum, suffering from epilepsy and mental retardation, Sanjay has a Jan Dhan account into which the South Delhi Municipal Corporation is supposed to deposit his disability pension of Rs 1,000 a month. 

However, erratic disbursements, inability to operate his bank account and the faceless nature of the transaction means that he doesn’t know when he receives his pension — or who to complain to when it doesn’t arrive.

 Sanjay is not alone. While thousands of zero balance accounts have been created in the capital’s banks, the economic empowerment they were supposed to bring has been impeded by poor implementation.

“Without citizen-friendly practices at the bank, wherein illiterate account holders have an authorised person to facilitate their banking experience,” says Anjali Bhardwaj of Satark Nagarik Sangathan, a non-governmental organisation that works on transparency and accountability in government functioning, “the Jan Dhan scheme will not be able to fulfil its potential for economic empowerment.”

Jan Dhan accounts are not the only poverty alleviation measure taken by the government that is suffering from the lack of proper implementation. At the ground level, the government’s laudable plan of using the holy trinity of JAM — Jan Dhan accounts, Aadhaar cards and mobile connectivity — seems hastily put together and poorly implemented.

“We’re all for using technology to make the government functioning more transparent,” says Amrita Johri of Dilli Rozi Roti Abhiyaan, a group of organisations working on the Right to Food campaign in the capital. “However, we are seeing a growing number of cases of people who are unable to access government schemes simply because they don’t have Aadhaar cards or just aren’t tech savvy enough.”

The push towards linking all social security schemes to Aadhaar cards is not, in principle, a bad one. However, the move to link all government schemes to Aadhaar cards has resulted in these cards being used as a means of exclusion.

 Whether it is the homeless who are unable to furnish address proof, or it is the transgender community whose gender listed on the ration/voter card does not match their current gender affiliation, or migrants unable to furnish address proof, there are thousands of individuals in Delhi alone who do not possess Aadhaar cards. Take the case of Anwari Begum from Jagdamba Camp. She has four children, a mentally-challenged husband and earns barely Rs 6,000 a month as a domestic help. “I applied for a ration card in 2013 but my application was rejected because I did not have an Aadhaar card,” she says.

 She finally had an Aadhaar card made, but by then the quota for issuing new priority cards had been filled. She worries about what would happen if she becomes unable to work. “My family will starve,” she says. Mobile usage, the third prong of JAM, is also fraught with problems. Having linked the disbursement of subsidised foodgrain to Aadhaar (in itself a contravention of the universal right to food), the government has introduced biometric identification using point of sale (PoS) machines as a pilot scheme to prevent the improper usage of ration cards (now known as priority and non-priority cards).

However, PoS machines fail where mobile networks aren’t strong. To manually override the system when this happens, a one-time password (OTP) is sent on the beneficiary’s registered mobile number.
 

 “This sounds fine in principle, but in practice, often people who are poor enough to be on the government beneficiary list do not have phones!,” says Johri. “And, even if they have a mobile, they don’t understand how to use or generate the OTP, and there is nobody to guide them.”

Given that demonetisation will eventually result in an increase in the tax revenues collected by the government, civil society activists argue it is imperative that some of this windfall be used to implement and strengthen existing government schemes for the poor. According to the Dilli Rozi Roti Adhikar Abhiyan, the East Delhi Municipal Corporation has not disbursed pensions after 2013, while its corresponding body in South Delhi has not given pensions to nearly 80,000 beneficiaries for over a year.

Numerous Right to information law petitions asking why this has been so, have been met with a reply that the corporation does not have funds to disburse. Another example is of the universal maternity entitlement scheme of at least Rs 6,000 for all pregnant and lactating women included in the National Food Security Act. However, Johri points out that till date, this scheme has been confined to 52 districts.
 
“At a time when demonetisation is threatening jobs and incomes in the vulnerable unorganised sector, we believe that the revenues accruing from it must go into strengthening the country’s social security net,” avers Bhardwaj. Else, the nation’s poor may not have any bread to eat with the JAM the government is doling out.