Direct Cash Transfer

Government is almost acting in haste to implement Direct Cash Transfer (DCT) scheme before 2014 Lok Sabha elections. For this reason the scheme has been symbolized by many to be a populist measure.

The scheme is not without merits in its intention - to curb leakage of subsidies, to make it reach to the actually targeted people, less maintenance cost and better administrative efficiency,  finally to benefit lesser privileged and reduce poverty. However, there are certain problems in implementation popping out such as absence for Adhar enabled bank account for all, technical issues like fingerprint detection and so on.

These problems can definitely be sorted out in due course of time. For the same reasons, rather than implementing the scheme at once in all districts DCT was taken as pilot scheme in 51 districts first to get feedback from field.

However, there are suggestions that there should be a change in approach itself in implementation. An example is of SEWA model where subsidies were not at once replaced with DCT but were done gradually in incremental manner. It had two benefits - First, implementation process was gradual and smooth. Second, none of the beneficiaries suddenly found themselves in an uncomfortable zone running for such things as opening bank account to get DCT rather they had enough time to adopt the change.