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The interim government in the upcoming national budget for the FY 2025-26, is reportedly going to restructure the Social Safety Net Programme (SSNP) by reducing the number of beneficiary schemes while at the same time increasing total monetary allocation as well as the number of beneficiaries.
The reasons for the inflated sizes of the current and previous SSNP budgets are that they had overlap of schemes and included other expenditures such as payments against pension for public servants and interest payments against savings certificates, etc., though the whole purpose of the SSNP is to alleviate poverty. Under the ongoing budget of SSNP for FY2024-25, for instance, the number of schemes is 140. In the FY 26, one third of the existing schemes would be cut bringing the total to around 100. But the total allocation would be increased from the present Tk 904.68 billion to Tk959.08 billion, which would be 12.5 per cent of the outlay for the national budget for FY26. But under the current fiscal (FY25), the allocation for SSNP is 11.35 per cent of the budget. The increment of the mentioned figures relating to the SSNP in the next budget is no doubt well-intentioned. However, improving the condition of the targeted beneficiaries, as always, will depend on efficiency of the mechanism to reach the actual beneficiaries.
In fact, even under the previous autocratic government, the budget for SSNP or the number of targeted beneficiaries saw similar enhancements with the arrangements for transferring the allowances digitally through mobile financial service (MFS). But the problems creep in through various flaws in the system. Firstly, problem lies with local representatives who decide the identities of the beneficiaries. The 2022's Household Income and Expenditure Survey (HIES) showed that 53.9 per cent of the poor and vulnerable families were excluded from social protection schemes simply because there were exclusion errors, while 62 per cent of the non-poor and non-vulnerable households received some forms of benefit due to inclusion errors. In this connection, to address such shortcomings of the SSNP, in the National Social Security Strategy (NSSS) of 2015, a life-cycle approach was adopted. The focus of the approach was to take into consideration the vulnerabilities and needs the people are exposed to at different stages of their lives, say, from childhood to old age.
But the taskforce the interim government created in September 2024, in a report submitted last February found that most social safety net schemes failed to align themselves with their core objectives of addressing poverty. Essentially, the absence of robust income support measures left a critical gap in tackling both moderate and extreme forms of poverty. For instance, according to the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS), between 2010 and 2022, the poverty rate fell from 31.5 per cent to 18.7 per cent. It marked an annual decrease in moderate poverty by 1.07 percentage points. Similarly, the extreme poverty dropped from 17.6 per cent to 5.6 per cent. That means, over the period, average annual rate of decline in extreme poverty was by 1.0 percentage point. In absolute terms, the number of people in poverty declined from 45.4 million in 2010 to 30.9 million in 2022. Similarly, people in extreme poverty fell from 25.3 million to 9.3 million. By correcting inclusion errors and reallocating resources, the results could be further improved. For instance, it could increase the percentage of decline in extreme poverty by 1.3 percentage points and that of moderate poverty by 2.5 percentage points, according to the said taskforce report.
The problem is, poverty research and its statistics are essentially based on samples and questionnaires to have a notion about the number of the poor and the level of poverty and dole out some allowances in cash and kinds accordingly. This cannot go to the heat of the issue. That is the main reason why poverty reduction through approaches such as SSNP will remain just a palliative care, not a cure, of the social disease called poverty. It does not mean that such programmes are useless. In absence of income generation activities for the poor, these can be stopgap measures. But in the long term, the goal should be building a society that can look after every member made vulnerable either by poverty or abandonment or illness or age. Among women, widowed or abandoned, one could fare better in their fight against poverty if the money they get in the form of periodical allowance were only sizeable enough to start an income generating activity. Even disabled and old people could be rendered productive if their special abilities or life experiences could be exploited through innovative income generating schemes tailored to their respective abilities. In fact, all human beings want to be useful for society. But for them to be able to contribute, society needs to come forward. Consider the amount being earmarked for SSNP, which is over Tk 959 billion. It is a humongous sum of money. If contribution from philanthropists, cheap bank finance and other forms of social resources could be added to that, targeted income generation (IG) schemes for different categories of the extreme and moderate poor and vulnerable groups could be designed and financed from that fund. With the help of AI, IG schemes for even every single individual could be conceived of. People so served by the IG schemes would become self-reliant and proud members of society. If only a nationwide enumeration of people in extreme poverty through a census and a database based on it could be developed and updated regularly, a better approach to remove poverty was possible to devise.
Until that happens, the recasting of the SSN schemes, regrouping 38 schemes, as suggested by the European Union and other development partners, under a pro-poor section, increasing cash assistance for an individual beneficiary by amounts ranging from Tk50 to Tk100 and so on are no mean measures. Moreover, a more transparent and streamlined SSNP with increased beneficiary coverage will definitely serve the intended beneficiaries better than before.