PM POSHAN

Charts: The Modi Govt Has Reduced Spending For Almost All Major Social Sector Heads

These are all major schemes and essential programmes that many marginalised communities rely on.

Despite the headline-grabbing figures of expenditure in this year’s Union budget, a closer look reveals a troubling reality for the nation’s poorest.

Major schemes and essential programmes that many marginalised communities rely on have seen a reduction in funding. This subtle yet significant shift threatens to undermine the support systems for those who need them most, raising concerns about the true impact of the proposed expenditure.

Source: Budget documents of various years.

In recent years, funding for key social sector heads has steadily dwindled as a percentage of the government’s total expenditure. Many allocations have either declined or remained stagnant, with any increases being merely marginal. The heads experiencing the most significant cuts compared to 2015-16 include food subsidy, social welfare, education, health, and fertilizer subsidy.

For instance, the allocation for food subsidy has decreased from 7.79% in 2015-16 to just 4.26% in the 2024-25 Budget Estimates. Social welfare funding has dropped from 1.7% to 1.1%, Education, from 3.75% to 2.61%, health from 1.91% to 1.85%, and fertilizer subsidy from 4.04% to 3.4%. Meanwhile, pension allocations have remained stagnant at 5.05%.

In contrast, allocations for agriculture and allied activities and rural development have seen marginal increase, rising from 1.3% to 3.1% and from 5.04% to 5.5%, respectively, over the same period.

These reductions in funding highlight a concerning trend in budget priorities, potentially undermining the support systems crucial for the nation’s most vulnerable populations.

Source: Budget documents of various years.

While major government schemes have seen significant reductions in expenditure, these quiet cuts have reshaped the landscape of social support.

The lower strata of society, who rely heavily on these programmes, are struggling to cope with the reduced aid. The following reductions in major schemes reveal a disturbing trend of shrinking support for those who need it most.

MGNREGA

Once a pillar of rural employment, the outlay for MGNREGA has declined from 2.09% of the total expenditure (TE) in 2015-16 to just 1.78% in the 2024-25 Budget Estimates.

NSAP

The National Social Assistance Programme, which includes the National Old Age Pension Scheme, Indira Gandhi National Disability Pension Scheme, National Family Benefit Scheme, and Annapurna, has seen funding drop from 0.48% to 0.20%.

Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan

This integrated scheme, launched in 2018 to unify SSA, RMSA, and Teacher Education, has had its allocation slashed from 1.46% of TE in 2015-16 to 0.78% in 2024-25.

PM POSHAN

The programme replacing the mid-day meal scheme has seen a drastic cut in expenditure from 0.51% to 0.26%.

Nutrient-Based Subsidy Scheme

Providing subsidised fertilisers to farmers, this scheme’s allocation has decreased from 1.23% to 0.93%.

Urea Subsidy

A critical component for farmers, the outlay has been reduced from 2.82% to 2.47%.

Crop Insurance

While suicide rates among farmers rise, this crucial safety net has only seen a marginal increase from 0.17% to 0.30%.

Pradhan Mantri Swasthya Yojana

Healthcare funding has been cut from 0.09% to 0.05%.

Pradhan Mantri Employment Generation Programme

Despite rising unemployment rates, this scheme’s budget has been reduced from 0.07% to 0.05%. Nevertheless, Modi claims that millions of jobs will be generated.

PM KISAN

Launched in 2019 to provide financial assistance to farmer families, the scheme’s allocation has fallen from 1.8% of TE in 2019-20 to 1.2% in 2024-25.

Pranay Raj works as a Data Analyst at the Centre for Financial Accountability, New Delhi.

‘Growth in Real Wages Virtually Zero Under Modi Government’: Data

Real wages for agricultural labour have stagnated since 2014. They had grown by 5-6% annually in the decade before Modi came to power. The spending on ICDS and mid-day meals too fell by 40%.

Ahead of the Lok Sabha election, the crisis of unemployment unites India as few things do. Why are important sections of India out of work? How do unemployed Indians live? Why is the work available not enough to earn a livelihood? How do Indians secure employment? How long is the wait? With India out of work, The Wire’s series explores one of the most important poll issues of our time.

New Delhi: Stagnating real wages, a decaying social security system and lack of concern for informal workers mark the Modi government’s 10-year tenure according to data collated by economists Jean Drèze and Reetika Khera.

While presenting their findings last week at a press conference organised by Loktantra Bachao 2024, the economists said that “real wages in the country had barely risen since 2014” across agricultural, non-agricultural and construction sectors.

From 2014-2024, real wages (wages that have been adjusted for inflation) for agricultural labourers declined by 1.3% every year according to data from the Ministry of Agriculture. This is in stark contrast to the increase of real wages by 6.8% each year under the Manmohan Singh-led government from 2004-2014.

“Real wages were growing very fast in the 10 years before Modiji came to power. It was nearly 5-6% a year, which is quite remarkable. It was the fastest growth of real wages in post-Independence India and now it is virtually zero,” Drèze said.

Photo:X/@JharkhandJanad1

The stagnation and decline in wages is not restricted to agricultural labour. Brick kiln workers across Rajasthan and Gujarat too haven’t seen any real growth in their wages, hounded by inflation and lack of other employment opportunities. Brick kilns are seen as labour intensive and a last resort to gain employment for India’s poorest.

Photo: By arrangement

According to PLFS data (2017-22) quoted by the economists, real wages have been stagnant for the salaried class and the self-employed as well.

Photo: By arrangement

Welfare spending and social security

Khera and Drèze said that the carefully constructed reputation of the Modi government as a big welfare spender doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

In 2014, five flagship schemes were laying the foundation for a solid social security system in the country. These were: the public distribution system (PDS), the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), maternity benefits, social security pensions, child nutrition schemes under integrated child development services (ICDS) and the midday-meal programme.

“All five have been undermined in one way or another by the NDA,” the economists said. It must be noted that barring pensions, all other schemes are part of legal entitlements to Indian citizens, derived through legislation or court orders, and not a gesture of generosity by any government.

Child development services

The budget allocation for ICDS and midday meals declined by 40% in real terms in the last 10 years. While earlier there was a larger umbrella of services under ICDS, the NDA government in 2021 introduced two new terms – Saksham and Samarthya – to club different schemes.

The budget allocation for Anganwadi services in 2020 was Rs 20,532 crore. In 2021, the allocation for Saksham, which along with Anganwadi included the National Nutrition Mission, was Rs 20,105 crore. This meant a loss of Rs 400 crore for a programme which now clubbed three other schemes along with Anganwadi.

Photo: By arrangement

PDS

Nearly 10 crore people have been left out of PDS due to a lack of updated figures and the Modi government’s failure to conduct the 2021 census.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty. Photo: Intifada P. Basheer and Azam Abbas

“It is unfortunate that we are still stuck on the 80 crore figure from the last census because the 2021 census was never conducted – a first in Indian history. According to our laws, the National Food Security Act, 50% from urban and 75% population from rural areas must be covered under PDS. This is how the government arrived at the 80 crore figure back then. If the census were to be conducted today, nearly 10 crore people would get added as beneficiaries of PDS,” Khera said.

Apart from this, “maternity benefits have been illegally restricted to one child per family; the central contribution to social security pensions under National Social Assistance Programme (NSAP) has stagnated at a measly Rs 200 per month; NREGA wages have stagnated in real terms and are rarely paid on time,” the two pointed out.

Renaming of schemes and exaggerated results

Khera and Drèze said that while the NDA government has, to some extent, compensated for this decline by taking up schemes with focus on building toilets, improving LPG access and housing, their success is much smaller than that what the government claims.

For instance, the NDA government declared India “open defecation free” in 2019, but NFHS-5 data for 2019-21 reveal that about 20% of all households had no toilet facility.

The Modi government is also guilty of renaming schemes launched by the UPA government and glorifying them with PR and marketing campaigns.

PM Awas Yojayana was Indira Awas Yojana
Swachh Bharat Mission came from the Nirmal Bharat Mission
ICDS and Midday meal were clubbed under PM POSHAN
Rajiv Gandhi Drinking Water scheme became Jal Jeevan Mission and,
PDS was rechristened as Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Yojana

Anganwadi Workers Are Fighting Against Unusable Tech – Just to Be Able to Do Their Work

While the amount of work for them is being increased with every new module added into unwieldy apps, the workers’ wages have stagnated.

Anganwadi workers are agitating in Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh, for a range of issues be addressed – from increase of wages, and lack of pension to other retirement benefits and regularisation of their services.

These protests are also stemming from their anger towards increased push of digitisation under the PM-Poshan Abhiyaan, where Anganwadis’ role of caregivers has been turned into that of data collectors. The honorarium paid to Anganwadi workers has also been linked to data entry into various apps under the PM-Poshan Abhiyaan.

A World Bank-assisted programme, PM-Poshan Abhiyaan aim to decrease stunting among children and reduce anaemia among women to reduce low birth weight. Anganwadi workers play an important role to provide early care for pregnant women, along with child care, by providing nutritious food and educating children in pre-schools. For this work, Anganwadi workers are paid a honorarium of around Rs 10,000 per month, while Anganwadi helpers are paid Rs 7,000 per month. The latter are considered volunteers under the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) Scheme.

The PM-Poshan Abhiyaan scheme introduced digitisation of all activities of Anganwadis using mobile application technologies. This digitisation process started with ICDS – Common Application Software (CAS), which pushed for digitisation of nutrition monitoring and growth monitoring of children, by facilitating data collection for decision making.

The ICDS-CAS was augmented with the launch of PM Poshan Tracker, which brought in a new paradigm of 360° profiling of Anganwadis and real-time data collection. The idea of real-time data collection was to function as a feedback mechanism to help improve local decision making.

Application flow of the ICDS-CAS mobile application. Photo: World Bank

The push for PM Poshan Tracker increased data collection by Anganwadis with every update of the application.

With various modules for pregnant women, lactating mothers, children of different age groups and adolescent girls, the app increased the burden of data collection from the Anganwadis to track real-time daily attendance and monitoring. Workers in Andhra Pradesh are being constantly pressured to fill the application every day to show “100% statistics” by their supervisors.

PM-Poshan Tracker app flow. Source: PM Poshan Tracker https://www.poshantracker.in

As part of the PM-Poshan Abhiyaan, Anganwadi workers were provided smart phones under the ICDS budget with a price cap of Rs 8,000 per mobile device, which were later revised to Rs 10,000 per device with updated specifications. These mobile devices which can only be procured through the Government e-Marketplace (GEM) and have consistently failed to function leading to Anganwadi workers being unable to enrol the beneficiaries and enter data that they were forced to collect.

With the threats of being removed from work and the lack of payment of honorarium for being unable to upload data through broken phones, the Anganwadi workers in Maharashtra approached the Bombay high court seeking relief. The court taking the issue of broken smartphones into consideration, ordered the government of Maharashtra to replace them with functional ones. The ICDS authorities also installed mobile-device management (MDM) tracking software to track all action performed by Anganwadis on these phones in Maharashtra.

As part of the litigation, the Anganwadi workers highlighted accessibility issues of the mobile application – the apps are only available in English and not in Marathi. The ICDS Commissioner and government of Maharashtra even opposed this as they wanted the Anganwadi workers to enter names of beneficiaries in English for the de-duplication process powered by Aadhaar. This strange assertion in courts that they can only de-duplicate beneficiaries in English shows how the state itself does not understand Aadhaar and how to apply it.

While the Anganwadi workers in Maharashtra have been fighting against ICDS software applications in courts, their counterparts in Andhra Pradesh have been similarly struggling with increased burden of these new applications. In Andhra Pradesh, beyond the PM-Poshan Tracker, workers are required to use an array of other mobile applications to create indents for supplies like eggs, milk and other food supplies from the government of Andhra Pradesh as part of their real-time governance strategy.

There have been constant complaints from workers on how these mobile applications and their servers do not often function. The Anganwadi workers are being asked to wake up in the middle of the night to upload data on apps, as the servers are not busy during the night. For the Child Development Project Officers and supervisors, unless the data on daily attendance and work has been collected, the Anganwadi workers have not completed their work for the day.

The distribution of mobile phones to Anganwadi workers means that they have to be constantly available over phone to respond in real-time to the supervisors. These supervisors who look at their dashboards everyday in the morning, want to ensure the pre-schools open on time, attendance of kids is recorded on time and every other activity happens on time too.

This is the core aspect of real-time governance being employed by Andhra Pradesh and the government of India. For real-time governance to occur, workers have to be available to work real-time. But they are unable to focus on work with broken apps and pressure from supervisors to constantly log work. Real-time governance demands workers act as robots who are constantly doing their task while responding to instructions too.

There is a constant push for the Anganwadi workers to collect new forms of data, the PM-Poshan Tracker has new modules to create health IDs of every beneficiary under the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission. All the data collected about children and pregnant women is now being stored using electronic health records. The creation of beneficiary profiles is the core aspect of 360° profiling being imposed by the state.

PM-Poshan Tracker app flow. Source: PM Poshan Tracker https://www.poshantracker.in.

In Andhra Pradesh, the Anganwadi workers have been given a new task of collecting facial biometrics of every beneficiary and to use them for authentication using facial recognition. The push away from Aadhaar to facial recognition in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana have been primarily because of the failures and fraud emerging from fingerprint recognition with Aadhaar.

Anganwadi workers have been facing a hard time in collecting and authenticating using AP’s facial recognition system AP-FRS. One of their demands, part of the protests, is to stop imposing the facial recognition system for beneficiary identification. A report from The Hindu highlights how this system has been failing, leading to pregnant women being forced to walk to the Anganwadi centre, for authentication, if the FRS is unable to authenticate them on the field. The constant failures in authenticating beneficiaries means Anganwadi workers need to work longer.

Workers are being forced to upload data into multiple apps by the Union and state governments. This has increased their work further with no data sharing agreements between the Union and states. The Anganwadi workers also maintain a physical ledger as these apps do not function all the time. This breeds a complex web of multiple records. One of the demands from Anganwadi workers is to create a single app instead of demands of multiple entries into different apps.

Beyond the data collection the workers are being additionally forced to conduct promotional activities by the government like Yoga Day. These new events and activities are added as new modules in the apps. The state continues to track whether these activities have been conducted or not through various apps, demanding digital evidence of participation of people.

PM-Poshan Tracker app flow. Source: PM-Poshan Tracker https://www.poshantracker.in

Contrary to popular beliefs of technology improving and easing the work for Anganwadi workers, these apps have had the opposite effect. The applications and various modules of the application constantly demand new forms of work from workers who are not trained under these tasks. These issues are universal for Anganwadi workers across India, who have been protesting over the last few years.

While the amount of work is being increased with every new module added into apps, the workers’ wages have stagnated. Anganwadi workers are treated as volunteers who are signing for a voluntary activity, but are being forced to work like a full-time worker. They are not being provided any health, insurance or retirement benefits for this work either.

One of the major demands of Anganwadi workers in Andhra Pradesh is to allow them to receive government schemes that are being provided to the general population. With 360° profiling of households, any government employee household is automatically rejected for any state welfare schemes. In the case of Anganwadi workers, they are treated as government employees and cannot get state welfare. At the same time they are treated as volunteers and do not get employee benefits. This is what the workers are fighting for, to not be excluded by the state in every aspect.

India is rapidly digitising. There are good things and bad, speed-bumps on the way and caveats to be mindful of. The weekly column Terminal focuses on all that is connected and is not – on digital issues, policy, ideas and themes dominating the conversation in India and the world.

Srinivas Kodali is a researcher on digitisation and a hacktivist.

Nearly Two-Thirds of Mid-Day Meal Cooks in India Are Paid Less Than Rs 2,000 a Month

There are nearly 25 lakh cook-cum-helpers (CCHs) engaged in the scheme, which is now knows as PM Poshan.

New Delhi: Nearly two-thirds of the people engaged as cooks for the mid-day meal scheme are paid less than Rs 2,000 per month, according to an Indian Express report.

There are nearly 25 lakh cook-cum-helpers (CCHs) engaged in the scheme, which is now knows as PM Poshan. According to the Indian Express, the monthly pay for the cooks has been frozen at Rs 1,000 since 2009 in eight states and three Union Territories. Additionally, in five states – Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan, West Bengal and Odisha – there have been minor hikes in the monthly payments but remain well below Rs 2,000. These five states account for nearly a third of the mid-day meal workforce.

One Union Territory and two states and in the south – Puducherry, Tamil Nadu and Kerala – pay the CCHs up to Rs 21,000, Rs 12,000 and Rs 9,000 respectively on a monthly basis.

A senior Union government official told the Indian Express that because the CCHs are classified as “honorary workers” who are rendering social services and not “workers”, the laws on minimum wages are not applied.

The official added that there had been two pitches to hike the wages to Rs 2,000 in the past three years, but the finance ministry shot them down, saying state governments should “top up the payment based on requirements and demands”.

Under the PM Poshan scheme, the wages of cooks and workers are split between the Union government and states in a 60:40 ratio.

The newspaper also reported that in March, a Rajya Sabha standing committee report had noted that the disparity in the honorarium paid to the cook-cum-helper by different states. It recommended the development of a uniform system for deciding the honorarium to be paid to the cooks and parity between different states. This was a reiteration of the recommendation made by another Rajya Sabha standing committee in 2020, according to IE.

Beyond the Big Promises, ‘PM Poshan’ Is Old School Meal on New Plate

Narendra Modi has taken a well-functioning but underfunded scheme and added his ‘branding’ to it. The least he could have done is allocated the kind of money the programme badly needs.

On September 29, the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA) approved the ‘National Scheme for PM Poshan’ in schools, details of which have been put out in a press release. While full scheme details are not yet available, this news has been covered widely across the print and electronic media. From the details of the scheme and financial outlays, it seems that this is just a repackaging of the school mid-day meal programme with a new name and some window dressing.

The Supreme Court in its ruling in the Right to Food case in 2001 directed that all children in government primary schools must be given a hot cooked meal on every school working day. While few states such as Tamil Nadu, Gujarat and others were already providing a cooked meal in schools, in other states dry rations were distributed once a month in schools under the National Programme of Nutritional Support to Primary Education (NP-NSPE).

The scheme was revised by the Central government in 2004 to include cooking costs to cover for other ingredients and implementation of a cooked meal and in 2007, it was further extended to cover children in upper primary schools (classes 6-8). The National Food Security Act (NFSA) also includes the provision of mid-day meals to children in class 1-8 in government schools as one of the entitlements under the Act. Schedule II of the Act gives the details of the minimum calories and proteins that the meal should have and rules that have been framed under this Act give further details of implementation.

The mid-day meal scheme, as it is popularly known, has by far been one of the best implemented welfare schemes of the government and is also well-received by communities. There is a lot of research and evidence, both in India as well as globally, that show that school meals contribute to child development in a number of ways. While provision of cooked meal in school increases enrolment as well as attendance of children, it contributes to addressing the issue of classroom hunger, improves nutrition among children, provides opportunities for socialisation as well as challenging social norms (such as giving priority to Dalit and Adivasi women in appointment of cooks) and so on.

Also read: What Freedoms, Which Schools for the Millions of Abandoned ‘Offline’ Children?

A recent study by International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) even suggests that the mid-day meal scheme in India has intergenerational effects on child nutrition through improving the mother’s health and education levels.

In recent years, however, the scheme has been neglected and the much-needed reforms towards improving meal quality, creating better infrastructure and putting in place stronger systems for accountability and monitoring have not been undertaken. The PM Poshan release mentions some highlights that will be undertaken such as promoting school nutrition gardens and using locally grown traditional food items with the help of farmers producer organisations and women self-help groups (as part of ‘Vocal for Local Atmanirbhar Bharat’).

Some states have already begun implementing such initiatives, recognised as ‘innovations’ in the official documents, and it is desirable for these initiatives to become one of the stated agendas of the scheme. This can contribute to boosting the local economy as well as achieving dietary diversity in a decentralised and sustainable manner. Millets, green vegetables etc. which have essential micronutrients and are currently lacking in the school meals can be included.

Another recent announcement by the prime minister on mandatory rice fortification, goes against this principle of ‘Vocal for Local’ and is more centralising in nature. (Many reports suggest rice fortification is ineffective against malnutrition, and analysts argue that we need to be extremely cautious when it comes to addressing micronutrient deficiencies in India through the process of fortification.)

This announcement, one hopes, will therefore bring back the attention on strengthening the local food system and improving diets for all.

The PM Poshan also makes social audit of the scheme mandatory, which again is a step in the right direction – something the NFSA also mandates. The new components of the PM Poshan are extending the scheme to students studying in pre-primary or Bal Vatikas linked to government schools and a special provision for providing supplementary nutrition items to children in aspirational districts and districts with high prevalence of anaemia.

While the details of the latter are yet to be revealed, for the former these children should have already been receiving one meal a day through the anganwadi programme. The NFSA mandates that all children in the age group of six months to six years shall be give one free meal a day. So, it is not clear whether this is an additional allocation or an administrative change of where the pre-school children will get a meal from.

Also read: Education in India Has Plunged Into a Crisis. Just Reopening Schools Isn’t Enough.

Poor budget allocation

What raises the suspicion that this announcement of a ‘new’ scheme might just be a damp squib is the financial outlays that have been provided. The release states that the financial outlay of the Union government for the for the five-year period 2021-22 to 2025-26 will be Rs 54061.73 crore. The equivalent budget allocation for the mid-day meal scheme for 2020-21 was Rs 11,000 crore and for 2021-22, it was Rs 11,500 crore.

Therefore, the given amount suggests that even in nominal terms we will not see any increase in budgets for the scheme over the next four years. This is very disappointing given the fact that the mid-day meal scheme has been suffering from stagnant budgets over the last few years. Economist Jean Drèze estimates that taking inflation into account, the allocation for the mid-day meal scheme has been reduced by 32.3% between the years 2014 and 2021.

Therefore, with such budgetary allocations one cannot expect much of change in the present mid-day meal scheme even though the scheme now has the prime minister’s name attached to it (PM Poshan – Pradhan Mantri Poshan Shakti Nirman). With schools being closed for over a year and household food security also being affected as a result of COVID-19, a revamped mid-day meal scheme is indeed required – one that takes into account the existing gaps in the scheme as well as goes the extra mile to compensate for the loss of the last 18 months.

For this a number of things could be done such as including eggs in the mid-day meal scheme at least twice a week, introducing a breakfast, extending the school meals to include children up to class 10 and enhancing the payments for cooks and helpers. Unfortunately, what we are witnessing is only some cosmetic changes along with an unwillingness to invest resources in this essential scheme for children.

The last time mid-day meal scheme was in news was in August this year, when it was reported that the finance ministry rejected a proposal of the education ministry for Rs 4,000 crore to introduce breakfast in schools – a recommendation of the New Education Policy. This probably gives a clearer indication of the actual intent of the government and its priority for children’s meals.

Dipa Sinha teaches at School of Liberal Studies, Ambedkar University, New Delhi.