cover image: Rethinking Social Safety Nets in a Changing Society

Rethinking Social Safety Nets in a Changing Society

18 Jul 2024

The Indian approach to social protection was developed at a time when a vast proportion of the population lived below the poverty line and unequal access to productive resources such as land and education led to endemic poverty among some sections of the society (e.g., the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes) and some areas (e.g. [...] The absence of comparable consumption data, the staple source of poverty estimation in India, in recent years, has also led to divergent opinions on the extent of poverty decline in India, the divergence between results from employment data and consumption data, and the role of changing methodology on estimates of poverty (see an e-symposium on measuring poverty in Ideas for India, October 2022). [...] In contrast, the IHDS data show considerable churn in the poverty status of the households and the growing importance of transitory poverty. [...] The National Food Security Act (NFSA) passed in 2013, expanded the pool of households eligible for subsidized rations to 50% of the urban households and 75% of the rural households; it also added millets and pulses to the items to be covered under NFSA. [...] A part of the exclusion of the poor may be due to the original design for BPL cards being linked to residential locations, which led to the exclusion of migrants.

Authors

Praveen Sachdeva

Pages
30
Published in
India

Table of Contents