Social protection promise

Governments have a strange way of behaving. Sometimes it takes a long time for them to do something that seems logical and desirable to a lot of people inside as well as outside of government, while at others they move at tremendous speed, perhaps too quickly, to do the same thing. The debates and arguments around social protection have had this character.

For the past many years, analysts, of a variety of ideological ilk, had been arguing for introduction of comprehensive social protection programmes to:a)-ensure that all poor people had access to a bare minimum of resources, b)-all vulnerable groups could be provided with assurances that they would be taken care of in case of a shock, and c) all people had access to resources that would allow optimal investments in asset creation: human, through access to education and health, and physical, through access to credit and insurance markets. But all of these arguments had been falling on deaf ears. The last government, despite all its talk of reform, growth and responsiveness to people, had flatly refused to take on the issue of social protection seriously. They had allowed some analytical work to go on in the area, but that work was then consistently ignored, recommendations were listened to half heartedly only and most of the time the increased allocations for social protection, if there were any, were paltry and mainly for window dressing and keeping critics at bay.

So, where Pakistan's Bait ul Maal's allocations did go up by a little, they were hardly ever more than Rs. 6 billion odd, when most analysts were saying that we needed a minimum of Rs. 20 odd billion to target just the poorest of the poor, and a lot more if we wanted to reach most of the poor in any meaningful sense.

Even more importantly, the analysts had argued that we needed to build systems that would allow us to provide social protection. We needed targeting mechanisms that could identify the poor in a reliable, transparent and credible manner, we needed mechanisms to reach these poor, and we needed independent monitoring and evaluation systems to validate our systems so that we could establish trust in these institutions: we needed to get away from the perception, that was there and still might be there about most social protection programmes including Zakat and Bait ul Maal, that these were poorly targeted, had issues of corruption, nepotism as well as inefficiency. But given the lack of interest of the government of the time, this was never attempted with any seriousness.

This was interesting also since the government of the time used to insist that they were a democratic government that was working for the benefit of the people, was responsible and accountable to the people and was looking for their support and votes.