Day 27 – Q 4.What are the behavioural constraints that limit the performance of various government schemes? Analyse.

4. What are the behavioural constraints that limit the performance of various government schemes? Analyse. 

विभिन्न सरकारी योजनाओं के प्रदर्शन को सीमित करने वाले व्यवहार संबंधी बाधाएँ क्या हैं? विश्लेषण करें।

Introduction:

 Behavioural economics points out a new set of constraints on behaviour that can help to sharpen public policy making tools – interventions based on this concept might be able to help to balance out potential forms of behavioural market and political failure. It is responsibility of policy makers to incorporate behavioural constraints into their frameworks for policy evaluation.

Body

Behavioural constraints that limit the performance of government schemes:

• Lack of awareness: Government is not fully aware of ground reality and they don’t have proper mechanism to reach the beneficiaries. And public are also not aware of the details of the schemes.
• Lack of communication: There are number of schemes introducing every month. Lack of advertisements, miscommunication among the public, misleading middleman will lead to ineffective implementation.
• Lax attitude of public: though government makes various schemes and initiatives with great vision. It is public interests to make use of those initiatives. Lax attitude, prejudice, high expectation leads to poor execution.
• Corruption: To enrol in certain schemes documents are mandatory. Various departments delay the documents and demand bribe. This results in waste of money and time.
• Caste and gender discrimination: In rural women are given less importance due to lack of knowledge. And caste discrimination still prevails helping only certain sectors.
• Target audience: New schemes to fund care for old age and childcare need to accommodate family attitudes that today constrain the reform of child benefit and caring schemes.
• Impractical target: Huge money, huge resources, and impractical targets shows failure of policy making and results in trust deficit in future government initiatives
• Digital divide: 70 per cent of over one billion Indians lives in rural areas, and only about 400 million have Internet access.
• Idle government RFPs: Many Request For Proposals (RFPs) issued by the government are not being picked up by competent private sector organisations since they are not commercially viable. Example: Biggest challenge faced by Digital India programme is the slow/delayed infrastructure development. Spectrum availability in Indian metros is about a tenth of the same in cities in developed countries.

Measures:

• Coordination: Better coordination among private entities, community, civil society, NGOs and government in designing a public policy in order to improve the transparency, quality and effectiveness of a policy or scheme.
• Evaluation and feedback mechanism: Can get feedback from time to time from public and errors can be minimized.
• Make use of technology: Grievance redressal mechanism can be made using apps in mobiles for quicker solutions
• Nudge theory concept: The concept is a relatively subtle policy shift that encourages people to make decisions that are in their broad self-interest. It’s not about penalising people financially if they don’t act in certain way. It’s about making it easier for them to make a certain decision

Conclusion

The Economic Survey has advocated use of the behavioural economics concept of ‘nudge’ to encourage desirable social and economic change in the country. The Survey recommends that the proposal to set up a behavioural economics unit in the NITIAayog must be immediately activated.