Government has been spending increasingly greater funds into various social safety net programmes for over five years in succession. The spending has two-fold objectives : to help the bare subsistence or consumption needs of the poor or the very poor and to help them as well to make a living. Government keeps on providing direct cash transfer to the poor, distributes food at nominal or zero costs , runs micro-credit activities to create means of livelihood and runs education, health and training programmes.
But the spending on direct dole or cash hand outs is seen to be heavier than the programmes meant to help the poor to help themselves. And every year the size of such safety net programmes is seen to be higher than the year before. Thus, the spending is some 86.89 billion taka on these programmes in the last fiscal year compared to 73.68 billion taka of such spending in the previous fiscal year. Thus, progressive higher spending on these programmes is noted.
Spending for the poor can be supported for their sheer welfare benefits. But critics have been also questioning about the manner of such spending and whether the same actually contribute to the long term goal of ‘sustainable’ poverty alleviation. A discussion meeting held sometime ago under the auspices of BRAC and the Bangladesh Rice Research Foundation discussed these aspects. It emerged from the discussion that the participants in it were in favour of not reducing the various official programmes for the poor. But they emphasised on running them transparently and efficiently, They stressed, more importantly, that the programmes must not create a sense of assured bail out always for the poor. They should be oriented to work their way out gradually to depend less and less on these programmes.
The suggestions from the meeting have obvious high value. For there is a danger that the poor or the very poor will likely develop a sort of dependence on the government’s dole and lose as a result a feeling of urgency that they must overcome their problems, the sooner the better. As mentioned before, the greater part of the safety net programmes presently are spent on direct dole which only feeds needs of spending on essentials such as food by the poor or very poor. Finding the system as useful, only a bigger and bigger number will likely try to be covered by it to be able to survive on the plea that there are no jobs or earnings.
But if it keeps on like this , government is likely to find itself at a point of time with a huge overburden to pay for them at the expense of the taxpayers and promoting resource denial to other productive sectors in pressing need of funds for their development. Even in the developed countries where there are elaborate social welfare programmes developed over many years, the outlook there-nowadays-is to keep such spending on a leash as people have become indolent and habituated to welfare than working for their living.
Clearly, the need in the Bangladesh context, is to go for a hard evaluation of the impact of the safety net programmes on the poor-so far-and to take appropriate measures accordingly. Allegations have been made that the programmes in many cases are missing out the truly deserving ones ; there are many political beneficiaries. These angles need to be also seriously investigated. The main thrust of the programmes ought to be on micro credit and related activities to gradually self employ the poor so that at one point of time they have no need to be utterly dependent on dole.
