Targeted direct benefit transfers (DBT) enabled by the so-called JAM trinity of Jan Dhan bank accounts, Aadhaar and mobile numbers may have been originally pushed by the Narendra Modi government at the Centre, but it is the states — the newly-elected Congress government in Karnataka being the latest — that seem to be the most enthusiastic adopters on the ground.
The Siddaramaiah-led government on Friday formally cleared the implementation of two DBT schemes: Gruha Lakshmi (transferring Rs 2,000/month to women heads of all households) and Yuvanidhi (unemployment allowance of Rs 3,000/month for graduates and Rs 1,500/month for diploma holders).
The two schemes — along with the other three Congress manifesto ‘guarantees’ of 200 units of free power per month to all houses, 10 kg grain/person/month for below-poverty-line families and free public transport bus travel for women — are estimated to cost around Rs 50,000 crore.
Karnataka had 1.34 crore households in the 2011 Census. The annual tab for Gruha Lakshmi alone, if one crore of those households are covered, will be Rs 24,000 crore. Gruha Lakshmi, to be rolled out from August 15, is a variant of the Tamil Nadu government’s Magalir Urimai Thogai scheme. The latter, which gives Rs 1,000 per month to women heads of ‘eligible households’, was promised in the ruling Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam’s 2021 assembly election manifesto. But its actual launch is scheduled only this September. Also, the scheme, with a budget of Rs 7,000 crore for 2023-24, covers only women of ‘eligible’ households, not all of them.
These DBT schemes, however, pale in comparison to those of neighbouring Telangana and Andhra Pradesh (AP).
Telangana has since May 2018 been implementing a Rythu Bandhu scheme for farmers, providing an ‘investment support’ of Rs 4,000 per acre per crop season that was raised to Rs 5,000/acre/season from 2019-20. Between 2018-19 and 2022-23, the K Chandrashekar Rao-headed government has cumulatively disbursed Rs 65,559 crore over 10 seasons, with the money deposited into the Aadhaar-seeded accounts of around 65 lakh land-owning farmers in the state.
Rythu Bandhu has inspired similar agriculture-DBT schemes, including the Centre’s Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi (PM-Kisan) and AP’s YSR Rythu Bharosa.
A criticism of DBT schemes is that it has reduced state capacity and voter expectations pretty much to making and receiving cash transfers. To that extent, they have detracted from the traditional brick-and-mortar government responsibilities of building schools, hospitals, roads and irrigation canals or investing in farm research and extension.