Cash transfers to the poor have long divided the opinion makers in India. This year’s union budget takes baby steps towards cash transfers to the poor. In a corrupt country like India, any government scheme is bound to be sucked dry by the corrupt administrators and the various mafia, so cash transfers seem to be the least damaging endowment policy. However, it has already raised the heckles of the left-leaning intellectuals. Members of the National Advisory Council, the most powerful decision-making body in the country today, are against the mechanism, citing various reasons from encouragement of free-market profiteering to wrong targeting. Right-leaning intellectuals, of course, are heavily in favor of cash transfers, saying it’s the only way a welfare scheme can survive the tsunami of corruption.
Here are two sane views from each sides: Jayati Ghosh argues against (while maintaining that the transfers should supplement, not replace public provision of goods and services), while Samar Haralankar argues for cash transfers (while building a solid case for having the necessary infrastructure like UID in place before the roll-out). Expect more heat and debates on the topic in the coming months and years.
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