Anti-poverty schemes, a success story

In the last 15 years, India has seen the adoption of an “alphabet soup” of ambitious national anti-poverty programmes: a rural connectivity scheme (PMGSY), a universal primary schooling initiative (SSA), a rural health initiative (NRHM), a rural electrification scheme (RGGVY), a rural employment guarantee (NREGA), a food subsidy (Food Security Act), and a new digital infrastructure for transferring benefits directly to the poor (UID).

The experience of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) suggests that effective anti-poverty programmes play an increasingly important role in Indian elections and are therefore here to stay.

Programmes like NREGA represent a quiet revolution in India’s poverty alleviation strategy.

India has for decades challenged the belief — sometimes called the “median voter theorem” — of political scientists that in democracies politicians cater to the voters who are most numerous: despite democratic institutions, and a predominantly poor electorate, effective public policies that benefit the poor have never been a priority for India’s ruling political elite.

As an example of the old approach, take the infamous Below Poverty Line card, traditionally the main point of access to government welfare schemes.

According to multiple surveys, as many as half of India’s poor households do not even possess a BPL card.

This is unsurprising; village studies show that the allocation of BPL cards by panchayats is highly discretionary, as much a tool for corruption and political influence as poverty alleviation.

Compare this to NREGA, the most important of the new flagship schemes. Unlike the means-tested BPL card, NREGA is universalistic by design, promising up to one hundred days of employment to any rural household that requests it.

NREGA has been relatively successful in reaching the rural poor. Why is India seeing relatively effective, well-funded, universalistic anti-poverty programmes like NREGA now after so many decades of narrow programmes with little political backbone?

Some attribute the shift to the pressure of newly mobilised political outsiders, including an activist judiciary and civil society groups.

This is half of the story. It does not explain the other half, the extraordinary receptiveness of ruling parties to these new programmes.

The shift is best explained not by the good intentions of politicians — after all, where have the good intentions been for so long? — but by the fact that political parties are learning that effective anti-poverty programmes can help to win elections.

The landslide re-election of the Congress-led UPA in 2009 was, at the time, widely attributed to the adoption of NREGA.

In light of the Congress party’s recent defeats in state assembly elections, some question whether anti-poverty programmes have really benefited the Congress party in elections. However, my own research, based on a comparison of Congress’s election performance across state assembly constituencies during the early stages of the programme’s implementation (when some districts had received the programme while others had not), suggests that NREGA did cause a large increase in Congress’s vote share in state elections. This increase, by as much as 4 percentage points, makes a big difference in India’s closely fought elections.

The fact that Congress politicians routinely advertise NREGA in campaign speeches suggests that they recognise the electoral benefits as well. If the UPA loses in the upcoming elections, it will be because it has alienated voters on so many other issues.

If the BJP-led NDA wins the upcoming national elections, as is predicted, what will be the fate of NREGA? Despite the fact that out of the public eye, BJP politicians criticise NREGA as “dole,” in practice, some of the states which have best implemented NREGA, such as Chhattisgarh, have been ruled by BJP governments.

These governments recognised that it is better to earn credit in the eyes of poor voters for implementing anti-poverty programmes well than to be perceived as obstructionists. In power nationally, the BJP is unlikely to roll back NREGA, at least openly. It is also sometimes forgotten that the BJP has adopted large-scale national anti-poverty programmes itself when it was in power: Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA), the universal primary schooling initiative, and Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY), a rural connectivity scheme. Both were taken fully on board by the UPA when it came into power.

One of the interesting results of my research on NREGA is that during periods of economic hardship, such as droughts, non-Congress state-level ruling parties were also able to benefit in elections from NREGA. This suggests that there is room for opposing parties to compete over credit for the same anti-poverty programmes.

This has been the case with the Food Security Act. In November 2013, in campaign rallies in the state of Chhattisgarh, Congress leader Sonia Gandhi claimed credit for the national enactment of the Food Security Act, while BJP prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi claimed credit on behalf of his party for originating the idea of food security with a state-level law in Chhattisgarh that preceded the national law. Indian politics appears to be entering a phase in which rival parties compete over who has done more for the poor with government programmes.

India is not alone in experiencing a transition toward large, universalistic anti-poverty programmes. A similar transition took place about a decade earlier in Latin American countries such as Mexico and Brazil. One of the striking features of these cases is that when a new party comes into power, it does not roll back existing anti-poverty programmes. Instead, it seeks to claim credit for existing programmes and propose its own variants.

The writer is a doctoral candidate in political science at Harvard University. This article is by special arrangement with the Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania