Labour Economics

Case Study 2
Social Security Schemes and their Reach: The Case of Kunkudupamula Village in
Telangana State, India.
Anusha Datta
1152190001
Introduction
The central difficulty to be tackled in many undeveloped and developing countries,
including India, is persistent poverty. Although India's rapid economic expansion
has resulted in steady progress in eliminating poverty, development has been
confined to the urban sector, with rural and isolated areas receiving little attention.
India is a country full of extremes. According to the World Bank database, about 67
percent of the population lives in rural regions in 2017, and as recently as 2016, India
has 191 million people living in poverty, with 145 million (or 78 percent) residing in
rural areas. In rural India, there is a need for government income support through
subsidy schemes, employment guarantees, or social security pension schemes, given
the higher levels of poverty, malnutrition, underemployment, and low productive
agriculture, as well as little potential for increasing and matching productivity growth
in the urban/non-agricultural sector. In numerous developing nations, subsidy
interventions are still a prominent policy tool for satisfying the basic requirements of
the rural poor. Such interventions include a large share of social safety net
programmes as well as development schemes such as health insurance, subsidised
treatments, free education for children, pensions for the elderly, widows, fertiliser
subsidy, surplus land distribution for the landless, seed and farm machinery, and
income assistance for the unemployed and farmers.
The central idea of the case
Kunkudupamula is a village in Telangana's Nalgonda district, located in the
Ramannapeta Tehsil. The community is 20 kilometres from the nearest town and 10
kilometres from the nearest railway station, indicating its isolation. Despite the fact
that the village is connected by all-weather roads and that automobiles and buses are
the primary modes of mobility, the transportation infrastructure is inadequate.
Although the village is electricity and has a cell network, there is no mail or courier
service.
The people of Kunkudupamula village benefited from a profusion of social welfare
and development programmes sponsored by both the central and state governments.
PDS initiatives benefited the majority of BC caste villagers (94.1%), followed by gas
subsidy schemes (91.5%), NREGA (87.3%), and fertiliser subsidy schemes (87.3%).
(68.6 per cent). No one from the BC caste group profited from the water harvesting
structures or the Small Farmers Scheme. The majority (89.1%) of villages in the FC
category benefited from the gas subsidy scheme, followed by the PDS scheme
(79.7%), NREGA (75%) and the fertiliser subsidy scheme (67.2%). PDS and
MGNREGA are subsidy systems aimed at low-income households and labourers who
are unemployed and prepared to do manual labour for a minimal pay to cover their
daily requirements. In general, some rich FCs households are unwilling to benefit
from the programmes due to a stigma linked to PDS rice and MGNREGA activities,
or because they believe that if they gain from the schemes, the other villagers will not
regard them as wealthy. Despite the lower participation of FCs, both PDS and
MGNREGA have a long history of addressing basic food and job needs.
Utilisation of Benefits
All social group houses took advantage of the free power, fertiliser subsidy, and soil
health care initiatives. The development-related schemes (agriculture) are utilised
for the intended purpose more than the general welfare programmes.
Discussion and recommendation
Whether or not economic expansion lessens poverty has long been a point of
contention. Although the Indian economy has grown at a rate of over 7% per year
since the 1990s, the advantages of this expansion are not evenly distributed. It
primarily favoured the urban wealthy and the top 30 to 40% of the population.
Hunger, poverty, and a lack of basic requirements like as food, clothing, and shelter
continue to plague rural communities and household’s dependent on agriculture,
scheduled and backward castes in distant areas. It is also a well-known truth that in
developing countries such as India, trickle-down effects do not function. As a result,
there is a need to increase purchasing power and provide subsidies to vulnerable
groups of people, particularly in developing countries' rural areas.
Some universal schemes, such as MGNREGA, PDS, gas subsidy, and the mid-day
meal scheme, benefit the vast majority of the population, while others, such as
MGNREGA and PDS, benefit the wealthy more than the poor, thereby negating the
entire purpose of the schemes, which is to act as social safety nets and assist the poor
more than the wealthy. Some systems, such as fee reimbursement, benefit a certain
group of the population based on whether the home has an engineering student, a
hospitalised child, or a married daughter.