Before the national budget was announced, Finance Adviser Mirza Azizul Islam had a series of meetings with country's intelligentia, politicians, economists, business leaders and various other professional groups. All wanted that something must be done to save the country's hardcore poor who are undergoing enormous sufferings on account of high prices of essentials that include rice, flour, edible oil and pulses.
When such demand was raised in various forums, the finance adviser wanted to know what could be that 'something' and what should be done to check the price hike. Nobody, in fact, could come up with specific and concrete suggestions. However, former adviser Akbar Ali Khan suggested to provide free food to 15 million people for a certain period. Can the government do it? To this question, the finance adviser said: "We will have to consider the financial implications of such plan if we wish to provide one kilogram of rice daily to 15 million people for two months. From among the donors, it is difficult to find anyone who is ready to finance the free feeding programme."
Many participants in the pre-budget discussion sessions held the view that food subsidy could be met from the foreign exchange reserve. The adviser disagreed on financing from forex reserve for food subsidy and said there is a wrong perception about the reserve. First of all, the foreign exchange reserve is not a government property. Secondly, it is also not too high against the absolute requirement for keeping a reserve equivalent to three months' import payments.
In fact, the government had no other options but to widen its safety net programmes. In the proposed budget, the government introduced four new social safety-net programmes of Tk 30 billion to relieve people of the brunt of high food prices. The amount is almost equal to the allocation including micro-credit provided by the government for social safety nets in the current fiscal year. One of the four programmes is a Tk 24 billion scheme designed to create employment for 100 days a year for around 2.0 million people below poverty line, especially of the char and Monga-hit areas.
The government has already directed authorities concerned to enlist the people of low-income group for the programme. In the draft of the programme, the government has decided that the people will be employed for 50 days during March-April and 50 days during September-October. Each day, the wage of each employed worker will be Tk 120, while the government will provide the same amount as allowances to the enlisted workers who cannot be provided employment for the first 50 days. The allowance amount, however, will be reduced gradually.
Another Tk 250 million will be allocated for a programme to provide maternity allowances to women of low-income groups including garment workers in urban areas. Under the current fiscal year, there is a similar programme in the rural areas where poor women are provided Tk 300 monthly. The government has planned another Tk 2.0 billion programme for rural employment and road maintenance. The workers employed under the scheme will get Tk 120 a day for road maintenance and social forestry. They will also have to deposit a portion of the wage to the bank and after a certain period can get bank loans against the savings.
Undeniably, all these are good programmes for poverty alleviation in the country. But the government must strengthen its mechanisms for efficient distribution of the money allocated for the programmes. The caretaker government has increased the allocation for social safety net by 48 per cent, introducing the first ever employment guarantee scheme worth Tk 20 billion in the proposed budget. The new budget has also included a larger number of people as beneficiaries of the social safety net, in a bid to address the woes of the poor and the lower-middle income group people, following the impact of global food shortage and price hikes of essentials.
During the period of four-party alliance government and previous other regimes, there were allegations that the safety net programmes were politicised. There are grounds to believe that there has been a lack of objectivity in dishing out the funds. Otherwise there can hardly be any rationale for allotting more funds to a region, which has lesser percentage of poverty, as in the case of Sylhet Division, for example, which, in spite of having the second lowest incidence of poverty, received the highest safety net benefits. One fails to understand the rationale except raising questions about what sort of considerations was given while making the allocation.
The government should set the criteria clearly and say what qualifies a person as 'poor' to meet the requirement to be a recipient of the fund. This is essential because a very important safety net programme of the government, the primary education stipend programme, may prove a failure if a very large segment of the beneficiaries of the support continues to be the non-poor. What is more disturbing is also the fact that 11 per cent of them don't even meet any single criteria. Similar is the case with the vulnerable group feeding programme.
For a country like Bangladesh, the safety net programme is indeed a praiseworthy project. More fund needs to be channelled, and the proposed budgetary allocation is substantially higher than that of current fiscal. But if the allocated money fails to reach the deserving persons the efficacy of the programme is sure to be adversely affected.
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