By Dr T Prabhakar Reddy According to the International Labour Organisation, “social protection or social security is a human right and is defined as the set of policies and programmes designed to reduce and prevent poverty and vulnerability throughout the lifecycle”. Social protection and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are intricately related insofar as the former […]
By Dr T Prabhakar Reddy
According to the International Labour Organisation, “social protection or social security is a human right and is defined as the set of policies and programmes designed to reduce and prevent poverty and vulnerability throughout the lifecycle”. Social protection and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are intricately related insofar as the former is a strategy in achieving the latter and many goals are directly or indirectly related to it.
SDG Targets
According to the global SDG indicator framework, target 1.3 about goal 1 talks about the implementation of social protection systems and measures for all, and expects to achieve substantial coverage of the poor and vulnerable. Target 3.8 deals with the achievement of universal health coverage, including financial risk protection, access to quality essential healthcare services and access to safe, effective, quality and affordable essential medicines and vaccines for all.
Similarly, target 5.4 is about recognising the value of unpaid care and domestic work provided by women and girls and addressing it through social protection policies in addition to promotion of shared responsibility within the household and family. Target 8.5 deals with the achievement of full and productive employment and decent work for all and persons with disabilities wherein the social protection system helps in increasing productivity and human development. In fact, social protection is one of the four pillars of decent work. Target 10.4 deals with designing policies relating to fiscal, wage and social protection and progressively ensuring greater equality.
Contextualisation
In India, public expenditure on social protection (except health) to the working population (15-64 years) in relation to the GDP is just 0.6%. The framework for looking at the social protection system includes; promotional, preventive and protective measures. Promotional measures aim to improve incomes both in the short to medium term and longer run through livelihood and human capital interventions while preventive measures seek to avert deprivation prospectively by supporting households to manage different risks ex-ante.
Protective measures, on the other hand, provide relief against deprivation ex-post to the extent that the other two sets of measures fail to do so. The government should follow the ILO’s normative framework for building social protection systems, including floors, which are critical in achieving the SDGs (WSPR, 2017-19, ILO), including:
• Access to essential healthcare, including maternity care, etc.
• Basic income security for children
• Basic income security for working age population who are unable to earn sufficient income, in particular in cases of sickness, unemployment, maternity and disability
• Basic income security for older persons
It appears that the GoI is thinking of displaying its commitment to transforming the existing social protection into an effective one by making it a legal right for all informal workers. Thus, they need to bring in changes in the ‘Code on Social Security’ to make it more meaningful and relevant to the workforce in the country.
Fiscal Space Creation
According to The World Bank, social protection systems that are well-designed and implemented can powerfully shape countries, enhance human capital and productivity, reduce inequalities, build resilience and end the inter-generational cycle of poverty. It has been established that such systems are ‘transformative’ as they not only help the poor and most vulnerable mitigate economic and fiscal shocks but also help ensure equality of opportunity by giving them a chance to come out of poverty and become productive members of society. In fact, well-designed social protection programmes are cost-effective, costing countries on average about 1.5% of the GDP (The World Bank in Social Protection, 2020).
Having recognised the significance of social protection, many developing countries are resorting to fiscal space creation by using different methods and approaches. Costa Rica and Thailand governments have reduced their military spending to finance social investments. Indonesia and Ghana have used fuel subsidies for social protection systems. Bolivia is a classic example of natural resources extraction tax (gold, tin, petroleum and gas), which enabled the government to provide non-contributory pensions to all Bolivians over 60 years old, cash transfer for all children in public elementary schools from first through eighth grade. Norway’s approach of taxing oil profits and storing the revenues in the Government Pension Fund Global is perhaps the best example that can be emulated.
The Mine and Minerals Development and Regulation (Amendment) Act, 2015, can be used to raise revenue for social protection systems by the Government of India rather than the present system of leaving it to the district authorities wherein the utilisation of resources is 33%, which is sub-optimal. There are many such avenues in India from which resources can be raised and invested in health and education while socio-economic investments that benefit poor households can be ramped up.
The Challenges
Firstly, lack of coordination and overlap in the delivery of programmes, both within and across levels of government, reduces the accountability of those responsible for social protection service delivery. Secondly, maintenance of a “one size fits all” social protection programme and policy mix does not respond to the growing spatial diversity in living standards. Thirdly, the basic “nuts and bolts” of programme administration and procedures in most States are far below the standards.
Fourthly, for many programmes, expansion of and innovation in the private sector has created possibilities for new modalities of public-private partnership programme delivery, which are yet to be explored fully by the public sector. Finally, The World Bank report mentions that household targeting mechanisms are poorly designed and implemented. Coupled with limited government resources, it is a real challenge that needs to be focused on.
Avoiding Errors
Firstly, designing appropriate targeting mechanisms based on authentic data and ‘unified data base’ creation on the actual beneficiaries by the government would result in ‘evidence base’ by which tracking the benefit received or not becomes possible. Further, the evidence base created is useful in policy and programmatic action to improvise the existing ones efficiently.
Secondly, regular monitoring of the implementation would result in avoiding inclusion and exclusion errors. Thirdly, designing tailor-made social protection programmes based on the specificities and diversity of the population and avoiding overlap in delivery of programmes within and across different levels of government would enable in covering the unreached and providing efficient social protection to the needy population. Fourthly, minimum social security standards, the universality and portability of social protection benefit when people migrate to other places, need to be addressed by amending the ‘Code on Social Security’. Further, moving to more consolidated and cash-based programmes for the chronically poor and addressing the needs of the urban poor is the need of the hour.
Finally, universal social protection requires additional funding which can be met through fiscal space creation. The GoI should allocate more funds for social protection systems in the upcoming Budget and constitute a body to look into the mobilisation of resources. Then achieving SDGs will not be an insurmountable task.
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