Over a year after it was passed, identifying beneficiaries under the > National Food Security Act (NFSA) is delayed as states are yet to specify fresh criteria and complete verification. The Socio Economic Caste Census (SECC) proposed as a comprehensive survey to identify socio-economic characteristic of the poor, which could be used to identify beneficiaries under NFSA, is more than two years behind its scheduled completion in May 2012.
Multiple agencies involved in the SECC — the Ministry of Rural Development (MoRD), the Electronics Corporation of India Limited (ECIL) which was the nodal agency to provide enumeration devices and data entry operators, and state officials — pass the buck as they explain the delays. So far, the process of inviting claims and objections following the publication of draft lists has begun in 272 districts, in less than half of 640 districts, while over Rs. 3,237 crore of the allocated Rs. 3,543 crore has been spent already.
With SECC far from complete, a few states have proposed their own criteria, which may be less robust and transparent than SECC. Bihar is an exception using draft lists from SECC to carry out fresh identification of the beneficiaries under the Food Act, even as states such as Rajasthan have resorted to adding new beneficiaries to existing BPL beneficiaries using old census data from 2004.
“After NFSA was passed, Congress-ruled states such as Delhi, Rajasthan, Himachal were quick to do roll-outs before elections, some using data from 2002 and 1998, instead of SECC. Some states have neither finished SECC, nor yet finalized their own criteria based on central guidelines,” said a senior official at Ministry for Food and Civil Supplies.
MoRD and state officials cite both technological difficulties and mismanagement such as manpower shortage and delays in wages for surveyors for delays in SECC.
For the survey, enumerators used scanned images of hand-written data from the National Population Register (NPR) to verify household members' basic details. They were accompanied by data entry operators (DEOs) who entered the responses into a tablet computer. “Initially, the plan was to collect data and digitise it later. A year on, it was decided that scans of handwritten documents will create confusion when displayed, as these may not be legible. We decided to digitise the NPR data before displaying the drafts lists in villages, which took time,” explained a MoRD official.
In Jharkhand, officials say it is difficulties in digitising and merging of NPR data with SECC that is delaying SECC. “Three vendors have been employed by ECIL here. The DEOs provided by the vendors were so poorly trained, we had to do re-evaluation in three districts,” said a state official. The state is struggling to complete the SECC even as it yet to finalize its own criteria.
In Odisha, the local vendors hired by ECIL withheld SECC database files for several months last year as the DEOs salaries not been on time by central agencies. The state has announced its own criteria for NFSA instead of the SECC.
In Bihar, officials cite similar delays because of shortage of, and non-payments of salaries to DEOs. Yet the state is among the few that have decided to update lists of existing beneficiaries using SECC.
“We faced a lot of delays because of poor quality of DEOs of vendors of ECIL, and delayed payments. We needed 50,000 DEOs but their actual numbers were much fewer and the work would drag on. But the state was set to benefit a lot under NFSA which will cover 85 percent of the rural population. Earlier, we got subsidized grains for 65 lakh families, which will now increase two and a half times to 1.5 crore. Allocation of food grains will double. So the state government spent Rs. 20 crore instead of waiting for central government payments. Since only 15 per cent rural population was excluded, we decided to use 11 exclusion criteria from the SECC such as income tax payees etc which was simpler,” said a senior official. Bihar has so far issued new priority ration cards to 77 per cent of its rural population, keeping 8 per cent as margin till SECC is completed.
“SECC is the most reliable source to identify Food Act beneficiaries and is more transparent. States like Odisha are trying to take short cuts but eventually this may take even longer as they will now separately verify income tax and land records. In Jharkhand, assembly elections are coming up so they may push SECC to next year. States like TN that had universal coverage are dragging their feet as they wish to keep the coverage universal,” said economist Jean Drèze.
