Keep social safetynet program above politics
19 February 2014
GROWING allocations
for Social Safetynet Program (SSNP) has provoked a new debate at a time
when the poverty rate has come down in the country below 30 percent as
claimed by Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS). The debate has more
relevance when the government has taken the move to convert the food for
work programme to cash for work. Here the misuse and misappropriation
of fund is at the center of the debate as cash is more secured for
pilferage and easy distribution to political groups.
According to a
newspaper report on Monday, the governor of Bangladesh Bank has raised
the issue saying if the poverty figure is now below 30 percent, then why
the government is paying allowances taking 50 percent of the population
under social safetynet programmes. He has also rightly pointed at the
proper utilization of the fund which is mostly handled by local
government officials and representatives. The room for misappropriation,
misuse and pilferage is enormous at that level through politicization
of the system, corruption and personal greed of local party leaders and
workers.
Reports said that the government is now annually spending
around 2.5 percent of GDP on social safetynet. The policymakers have
now decided to increase the spending under a proposed National Social
Protection Strategy (NSPS) prepared by the Planning Commission. While we
have every support for spending to provide greater safety to the
marginalized groups, we are also equally apprehensive of whether the
government is moving to raise the allocations to an area where proper
transparency of disbursement of benefits and accountability of spending
are highly vulnerable to questions in the light of past experience of
huge misuse and exploitation of those benefits on political grounds. The
Bangladesh Bank governor may have rightly raised the point and we
suggest that the policy makers must pay heed to the concerns he may have
raised in this regard.
Benefits from social safetynet porgrammes
now accurse to the poor under Vulnerable Group Development (VGD),
Vulnerable Group Feeding (VGF), Food For Work (FFW), Test Relief (TR),
Gratuitous Relief (GR) and Old Age Allowances. The new policy aims to
identify high priority schemes and make the system more inclusive by
incorporating a higher proportion of the poor and vulnerable people when
their overall number is on decline as per BBS report. Moreover it plans
to convert the food for work to cash for work where the room for misuse
and pilferage may be the highest. So we may ask the policy makers to
assess the effectiveness and performance of the existing safetynet
programmes before further extending it covering more budgetary
resources.
We also suggest the strengthening of the local government
system by making them truly elective to make its functionaries more
transparent and accountable to the electorate in disbursing safetynet
benefits. Discrimination of the beneficiaries on political ground is
often reported. Moreover using the resources to advance political cause
and patronizing even well to do political workers with the fund is not
something new. We are against using tax payers money and budgetary
resources to that end and demand the government to keep the safetynet
issue above politics.
