THE NOWHERE MEN & WOMEN HOW INDIA ABANDONED 14 CRORE CITIZENS ON A POLICY PAPER

The government of India runs the world's biggest food security scheme, which provides free ration to more than 80 crore people. The scheme has won Prime Minister Narendra Modi accolades. But what if we realise that there are over 14 crore people who have been omitted from the benefit of this scheme because the government has not counted Indian citizens in over a decade? Can its intransigence break the welfare structure of governance?

- Rajat Mishra

Kaagaz has become a crucial word for people in their struggle for daily survival as they look up to the government for succour when economy fails them. The 2021 movie Kaagaz, starring actor Pankaj Tripathi as Lal Bihari Singh from Uttar Pradesh, seems straight out of a rural Indian landscape, where bureaucracy pushes a person into the darkness of a dreaded file by declaring him dead. Then starts Singh’s quest to be counted alive in the government roll call.

The story of the film may seem disjointed and unreal, but a part of it is certainly playing out in India’s hinterland. Take, for example, the case of 50 villagers of Khajuria Jagir village of Kurwai tehsil in Madhya Pradesh’s Vidisha district who were declared dead on the Samagra portal in July 2023 when they were still alive. (Samagra is a social security programme of the state government.)

The quest of the villagers to prove themselves alive began with earnestness, as being declared dead means that they can no longer be beneficiaries under the many welfare programmes of the state and Central governments.

Unlike the people from Khajuria Jagir, who were officially counted before they dropped “dead”, many of India’s poor wait endlessly to be included in government lists of welfare programmes even when they can prove that they are deserving candidates. Governments and bureaucrats are, in fact, fighting a self-inflicted poverty of its own kind that has jammed public policy of welfare economics in the country.

And this is not just a result of India’s infamous redtape syndrome. There is much more to it.

Outside the Government’s Benevolent Gaze