Design a system generating the total no of people eligible for receiving pensions under NSAP (Indira Gandhi National Old Age Pension Scheme) but are not included(area wise)
Abstract : The National Social Assistance Programme consists of five social assistance transfers, which form the core of India’s fledgling minimum social protection floor. These transfers have been scaled up over the last decade and further steps will soon be taken towards their universalization with exclusion criteria. This paper provides a rigorous evaluation of two of the NSAP schemes, the old age pension and the widow’s pension. Using the 2005 Indian Human Development Survey data’s detailed information on household income and consumption expenditure, the paper measures the impact of the two pensions on household’s incomes, consumption and poverty status, using the propensity score matching estimator. The pensions are found to vary in their effectiveness given the wide diversity of recipients across income quintiles, spatial location, and social group. The widow’s pension is shown to reduce poverty among recipients by about 2.7 percentage points. Government attempts to target the pensions to poor households have been ineffective, and steps towards universalization may in fact improve the pensions’ effectiveness.
? The success of implementation will lie in proactive identification, enrolment and coverage led by the State without imposing entry level or other subsequent burdens on the potential or existing beneficiaries.
? To ensure consistency with existing legal norms of marriage, minimum age for IGNWPS should be reduced from 40 to 18 years.
? With problems in existing BPL lists, difficulties of applying and gaining entry to the schemes, and uneven implementation, deserving beneficiaries risk exclusion.
? Some of the populations targeted by the scheme, such as elderly persons, are not considered among the most vulnerable populations in the country, given other pressing social problems like widespread informal and vulnerable employment.
? In practice, using the ration card as a proxy for NSAP eligibility is problematic. The problems of the ration card and their procurement are well known.
? Aging is not an issue of great immediate concern to India compared with other developed and developing countries.
• All reforms proposed and implemented must be undertaken with citizen centricity or beneficiary-centricity, as its focus.
• The ultimate objective to be achieved latest by the end of the 12th Plan should be to cover all those beneficiaries who are eligible for the proposed National Food Security Act, in both rural and urban areas.
• It is proposed to be 100% funded by the Central Government with States having flexibility to increase the pension amount.
? These efforts harness modern technologies and aim to deliver social protection more efficiently and with an eye on improving the countries human and physical capital.
? These probabilities were then used to match a suitable comparison group to the treatment group for both samples.
? The outcomes of interest used to measure household livelihoods are total household income, income per capita, consumption expenditure per capita and poverty status.
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