Identity Project's List: Frontline

"C. Chandramouli, Census Commissioner, addressing the media after releasing the maternal mortality estimates in New Delhi on July 7.

IT was with eager anticipation that the results of the 15th provisional national Census (the 15th since 1872) were awaited. Census 2011 has thrown up some interesting and also worrying results: literacy rates have gone up; fertility levels have declined; the child sex ratio (CSR) has worsened since the last Census, with several districts reporting regressive trends; the growth rate of the population in the Empowered Action Group (EAG) States has registered a significant decline; and the population of children (0-6 years) has declined. While other sociocultural and demographic data, including data on housing and household amenities, are yet to come, the Census office launched its caste Census in June following a government decision taken last year. Census 2011 also laid the foundation for the National Population Register (NPR). The caste enumeration exercise is expected to be over by the end of the year though it may take another six months for the findings to get tabulated and collated before being released.

Dr C. Chandramouli, the Registrar General of India and Census Commissioner, expressed concern over the declining CSR and spoke about the challenges of caste enumeration, among other things, in an interview to Frontline."

"Keep UID out of NREGA

THE undersigned demand that the plan to link the MGNREGA (Mahata Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act) to aadhaar (UID, or Unique Identity number) be revoked immediately. This is an extremely dangerous move that threatens to cause havoc in the MGNREGA's fragile structure.

The Ministry of Rural Development has put out a tender (dated October 11, 2010) worth Rs.2,162 crore to engage “service providers” for the MGNREGA under a “public private partnership” model. The contract includes “UIDAI compliant enrolment of job card holders under MGNREGA scheme”, “Recording... data in the field such as biometric attendance at worksite with GPS coordinates… and updation of centralised MIS” and similar measures.

Clearly, the Ministry intends to link the issue of new job cards to UID enrolment in the States. Job cards issued in 2006 are due to expire in 2011. Job cards are required to claim employment under the MGNREGA. If the issue of new job cards is linked to UID enrolment, there is a danger of creating a jam that would disrupt the programme. The process of job cards renewal, in any case a slow process, will be further slowed down. Many people are likely to be denied their entitlement to 100 days of work as they will be without a job card. Further, in spite of the hiring of “service providers”, the entire administrative machinery is likely to be diverted into capturing of biometrics or supervising “service providers”. The scale of MGNREGA works is bound to suffer. This would be a gross injustice to NREGA workers, who are already deprived of their basic entitlements.

The proposal of “biometric attendance at the worksite with GPS coordinates” is completely impractical – many MGNREGA worksites are in remote areas with poor or no connectivity. Does that mean those worksites will close down?

We do welcome the use of technology provided that it enhances transparency, empowers labourers and is cost effective. Such technology has been used with success in Tamil Nadu. For instance, it combines SMS

"Cash transfer as substitute for state service provision is a dangerous recipe for callously anti-poor and corrupt governance.

THE staggering number of recent articles, papers and books on the virtues of giving cash in place of public services to the poor has created an impression that a sort of epidemic has broken out.

Economists, policymakers, bureaucrats and newspaper commentators are all infected by it and are in turn infecting others. The central theme in the chorus is that the Indian state's efforts to provide services such as food distribution, health care and education to the poor have failed, thanks to massive leaks, inefficiency and corruption. These efforts must be replaced by direct money transfers with which people can freely buy these services.

Cash transfers are held by their advocates to be both more efficient and much less susceptible to pilferage than, say, grain from the Public Distribution System (PDS), a third or more of which is diverted.

Well-targeted cash transfers will reduce and abolish poverty and generate development, as the title of a new book puts it: Just Give Money to the Poor: The Development Revolution from the Global South. Even better, combine these with an Aadhaar or Unique Identity Number, proposed under the Unique Identification Authority of India chaired by Nandan Nilekani.

Conditional cash transfers (CCTs), which require recipients to put their children in school, or to be identified as below-poverty-line (BPL) households, are seen as a panacea by important policymakers, including Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, Kaushik Basu, Chief Economic Adviser and Ashok Gulati, Chairman of the Commission for Agriculture Costs and Prices."

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