The welfare state is a big giver. For some reason, it seems
to prefer beneficiary based schemes to infrastructure based schemes. Which
defies electoral logic - since broad based schemes involving public goods
benefit the whole electorate, while the budgetary constraints prevent more
than a tiny number of the electorate from getting the benefit, while it does
sow resentment in the rest of the non beneficiary population. Still, there may
be that perversion of the American Dream - for the want of a better term, it
can be called the 'Indian Dream' - while the American version holds the promise
of a good life if one works hard and brings oneself to a level, the Indian
version promises access to the state munificence once one is able to get
oneself labelled socioeconomically 'weak or backward'. Just, for some reason,
the propensity of the State to spend on individual beneficiary program is very
strong. Stronger still is its distrust of its same beneficiaries. That is why
after taking umpteen number of affidavits and certificates, in triplicate, it
sends its employees to verify the antecents mentioned in the scheme documents.
Of late, for quite good reasons, it has developed a healthy suspicion of its
own employees as well. Hence, now senior officers are sent in to verify the
employees' work!
So it was on a similar verification run. One particular
beneficiary was proving too hard to locate. For one, the address was in one of
the most congested locations of old Meerut city, and the twists and turns in
the lanes were good enough to get one lost. Plus these impoverished localities
are full minor delinquents like power thieves and revenue defaulters, and hence,
the general level of cooperation being extended to us was quite low, as the
interrogated persons suspected us of looking for these delinquents in the garb
of checking beneficiaries. The official vehicle did not help - for the lanes
were too narrow to bring it in, and for it kept on scaring the delinquents who
might have been helpful! We had asked the shopkeeper, the washerman and the
barber. Some had told us that the number of the house given in the address was
larger than the total number of houses in the area. Great! It appeared that we
had detected a fraudulent beneficiary who had slipped through the first level
of investigation, and was about to mark it so. That's when, as an afterthought,
I asked this confectioner about the whereabouts of this beneficiary, before
striking her off the list. The confectioner nodded his head in the negative, as
was expected. However, a man on a bicycle who was dealing with some papers at
the adjacent shop asked me to repeat the house number. That I did, and then the
person led me through an even narrower lane, on his bicycle. There she was, at
the very end of this lane, our beneficiary, very much poor, and very much
eligible; whose name was nearly about to be struck off the benefits list
because of her anonymity and inconspicuousness, in the eyes of her close
neighbours, and it was not some minor benefit, but a well built concrete 1BHK
flat by the Urban Development Authority! The cyclist told us that the erroneous
house number was there because of the proximity of the house to the next
equally crammed colony, whose number series was put on this house despite being
in a wholly different locality. The person we were unable to find for more than
an hour; whose neighbourhood service providers were oblivious to her existence,
was located by this person in 2 minutes flat. This woman was about to lose a
house (or atleast about to find it a lot more difficult to get her name
restored after filing an appellate application and supplying evidence of her
existence), but for this saviour on the bicycle.
He was the local postman!
In this age of instant messengers, Skype and 4G cellular
telephony, the good old postal department may appear anachronistic to the
layman. The recent closure of its more glamorous, T out of P&T, half - the
Telegraph, was widely read as the beginning of the end. The department has
rejuvenated itself with a variety of new verticals - banking, life insurance
(this is one of the best 'government' insurance on the offer, by the way),
premium delivery services, and of course, philately. However, there is one area
in which the department, by the very nature of its core job, can become the
mainstay.
As I have said earlier, the welfare state likes to give. For
giving, and for a lot other purposes, the welfare state needs a lot of data.
Personal level data. The current system is centred on the Revenue Tehsil. In
almost all states, the Tehsildars and SDMs are the issuers of caste, income,
and residence certificates. SDMs and Tehsildars are the Electoral Registration
Officers (EROs) and Assistant EROs. For the certificates, the field
verification is done by Village Record Keepers ( Lekhpal) and for Electoral
works, a variety of ground level workers are deputed. However, Lekhpals are no
good in urban area investigation. That is because of two reasons – firstly, all
their records are connected to agriculture and agricultural land. It is during
the thrice a year field study that they check out all the sown holdings, and in
that process come to know the who’s who of the rural society. There is no
agriculture in cities, and hence, no such investigations happen. Secondly, Lekhpals
are appointed per Revenue village – and most cities comprise of one (or in some
cases like Meerut – two) revenue villages. So, for a population over a million,
there are just two chaps, supposed to know how much each of these millions persons
earns, where each of these million persons sleeps at night (in other words – is normally
resident), and what is each of these million persons’ parentage. The task seems
Herculean at best, and yet my city Lekhpals are doing that, everyday – putting their
signatures on various sorts of certificates, filling out all sorts of surveys
for various beneficiary oriented schemes, relying on dubious hearsay.
Similarly, our election BLOs, and our Census enumerators also have to rely on
hearsay. In their day job – teachers, or as anganwadi workers, their duties are
essentially static service delivery – they are at their school or daycare
centre, and the clientele comes to that place. The surveys allotted to them are
of the nature of mobile data gathering – going to the clientele, and collecting
information. When static service deliverers go out to the field to collect data,
they have to rely on hearsay. They ask around in the neighbourhood – and some
neighbourhoods are pretty distrustful of the government machinery – and they
give information not as per fact, but so as to manipulate the outcomes. So
fictitious names get added to the electoral rolls, incomes are understated to
avail benefits earmarked for lower income groups, wrong addresses are shown for
persons who would like to avoid identification. It would any day be a much
better job if a mobile service provider, who really knows his clientele literally
by their seats, did this kind of jobs.
I had a discussion
with my colleagues in the Postal Service. The department, too, is suffering
from short staffing from lack of recruitment commensurate with the retirements,
coupled with the rise in work load with the times compared to the work content designed
one and a half century ago. Very much like our Revenue Department! Hence, they
would really not like this suggestion of saddling their overburdened staff with
this work, from which they have been strangely kept bereft. May be because they
were the only mode of communication and hence categorized as ‘essential service’.
Or may be because being an arm of the Union Government, they simply went under
the radar of the District Election
Officers, or the District Registrars (usually Collectors), who work under the
States. However, being under the Union Government gives them an additional
advantage – impartiality. The state government machinery at the lower level
faces the worst of the bottom dweller politics. Hence they are quite vulnerable
to their threats. All (and I mean all) of the wrong electoral roll entries or
false certificates which I have detected in my tenure, were the outcomes of
pressure from some two bit fellow with the ruling party colours on his
letterhead. Central departments can stay aloof from the local politics, and
hence, impart the degree of visible impartiality which is needed in such
exercises.
There has been a growing murmur within the state government
about the need for a dedicated information and statistics cadre – given the
rise in work volume and the need for the fidelity of the data. Why not vest
this authority in a department of the Central government? As I have detailed
out earlier, the Postal Department has been very adventurous in diversifying
its post office based offer basket – into banking and insurance. However, the
postmen based infrastructure, if properly and adequately strengthened, and
vested with the responsibility of keeping the state records correct, can become
a real game changer. The postman used to be an important part of the society,
and has been immortalized in the arts – Rajesh Khanna riding that bike and
singing the immortal ‘Dakiya Dak Laya’, in ‘Palkon ki Chhaon Mein’, or the
adorable Thanappa in ‘The Missing Mail’ by RK Narayanan. As a keeper of the
records, he might regain that bygone glory. That is his concern. My own eyes,
however, since that day, have taken to this dream, that, someday, thousands of
his colleagues would make the strides of this welfare state very surefooted –
just the way that solitary postman was on his beat in the narrow lanes of old
Meerut!
