The government’s social safety net programmes often fail to effectively support beneficiaries due to a lack of coordination among serving agencies and misuse of benefits.
Currently there are 99 ongoing programmes in the country carried out by 19 ministries. But most of the schemes overlap in selecting beneficiaries, speakers said at a discussion on the current status of social safety net programmes held yesterday in the city’s Karwan Bazar.
For the 2014-15 fiscal year, the government has allocated Tk25,371.35 crore for its safety net programmes – around 11.5% of the total budget. The schemes include food for work, vulnerable group feeding, vulnerable group development, test relief and open market sale aimed at improving the poor people’s living status.
Around 15.7m out of 38.5m poor people in Bangladesh are in extreme poverty, which is 10.64% of the total population, according to the General Economic Division of the Planning Ministry.
The discussion was jointly organised by Wave Foundation and the Governance Coalition at the Daily Star auditorium.
The speakers suggested the government form a separate ministry or platform to coordinate all the programmes to avoid overlapping, so that more people can be brought under the safety net umbrella.
“It will help the government to avoid overlapping and make the programmes fruitful, said Mohsin Ali, convenor of the Governance Coalition.
The professionals also suggested the government establish a database of the beneficiaries to find out the actual number of poor people.
Many beneficiaries allege the government agencies prioritise the names put forward by ruling party men while selecting the beneficiaries. Mohsin said the database would help selecting the people who really need support. “It will also cut misuse,” he added.
Kaniz Fatema, coordinator of the Campaign for Food for All, said the distribution of food items including rice and wheat needs to be replaced by cash through bank accounts, since the beneficiaries in most cases allege they are not given the exact amount of food items fixed by the government.
The discussants also urged the government to form a comprehensive policy for the social safety net programmes to make the initiatives effective. They also spoke for the need to formulate a Food Rights Act.
PKSF Chairman Qazi Kholiquzzaman Ahmad and Planning Commission Member Shamsul Alam also spoke at the programme, among others.