Out of Africa

The per capita quantities through the PDS have been dwindling over the last year or more in Andhra Pradesh. Yesterday there were demonstrations in Hyderabad protesting that the supply of kerosene and rice was being stopped for white card holders in hyderabad. i am not sure about the rice but i can believe that about the kerosene.

Seems like more and more that happens in India is modelled after what they consider is working in Africa.

There is a big experiment going on in some southern African countries that says that direct cash transfers are the best way of subsidising or reaching welfare dollars to the poor, vulnerable, disaster stricken and so on. The thinking being that once money is in the hands of the poor then the market will take care of the supply side of welfare.

No need to bother about bureaucratic competence, corruption, supply chains and so on. Just do this one big thing right (getting the money into the hands of the poor) and the rest will take care of itself.

The model is gaining a backdoor entry into India in the form of the Rural Employment Guarantee. Once we say that 100 days of minimum wages are available to anybody who is seeking work and also establish that empirically this is true through surveys and social audits -we can also say that anyone interested in keeping body and soul together in a socially acceptable way in India (no begging, stealing etc.) can afford do so at market determined prices.

So our dependence on the elaborate Public Distribution Systems will gradually reduce and over a period of time we can dismantle it or confine it to the statistical outlier population. Stands to reason doesn't it?