DELHI - On Jan. 1, a year before the 2014 general election, the governing alliance led by the Congress Party will roll out a sweeping cash-transfer program for India's poor. The plan is to replace existing pensions, scholarships and subsidies on household items by directly disbursing cash to the beneficiaries' bank accounts. It could apply to 720 million people.
Some say the program is a game-changer because it will limit corruption by reducing face-to-face interactions with public officials, who often ask for a cut of the money they hand out. But others claim it's the desperate attempt of a mother, the Congress President Sonia Gandhi, to buy the election for her son, Rahul Gandhi, a middling politician at best. Cynical as that last view is, I am inclined to agree with it.
The problem with the new program isn't the theory behind it, but the details of its conception and implementation. In 2003, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva started the ambitious Bolsa Familia cash-transfer  project in Brazil, and many credited his 2006 re-election to its success. But India's cash-transfer effort is nowhere nearly as well thought out.
The Bosa Familia project was conceived with the family as a unit, and it disbursed funds to the poorest 11 million families in Brazil only if they met certain conditions, like keeping children in school and having them vaccinated. The cash was transferred to the bank accounts of the female heads of the households , on the theory that they were more likely than the men to spend it on essentials required by the family.
India's program, in contrast, will disburse cash to individuals, who are more likely to look after only their own needs. It leans heavily on a controversial new biometric identification program that assigns a single 12-number ID to every Indian resident. On the face of it, this identification system is supposed to eliminate fraud that currently occurs when people register for benefits using fake names. But it will be nowhere near complete in time for Jan. 1, when the cash-transfer project is to be implemented in 51 of India's 659 districts, or even by April, when the program is expected to be extended to 18 of the country's 28 states.
Another major problem is that the Indian government has been unable to determine exactly what defines someone as “poor†in this country, and yet it needs some standard to go on. While Indian economists debate whether to use calorie consumption or healthcare expenditures as benchmarks - Brazil's system was based on per capita income - the government has decided to rely on a census identifying socioeconomic status and caste. But this tally has yet to be completed, and a final list will not be available until July 2013, well after the benefit project is supposed to have been rolled out in much of the country.
It also isn't clear that the program will reduce corruption. The money will still have to be handled by India's inef ficient bureaucracy and antiquated rural banking sector. A pilot cash-transfer program started in December 2011 in the Alwar district of Rajasthan to replace government subsidies for kerosene was initially touted as a huge success; the local government was said to be spending 79 percent less with the transfers than it had been with the subsidies. But it has since been revealed that the savings largely resulted from the fact that many of the funds were not transferred to their intended beneficiaries on time or at all.
India's largest business daily, The Economic Times, has asked, “Did the government jump the gun on cash transfers?†The paper has suggested that the cash program cannot be put in place before next October, if only because of the administrative formalities required to convert oil and gas subsidies into direct transfers. The oil ministry has already asked for a three-month delay in the rollout.
This confusion within the government reflects the hurried implementation of this grand project - and the hurry seems to reflect the Congress's eagerness to kick-start its 2014 election campaign. Only it's hard to see how the program, if it turns out to be as rickety as it seems now, will help the party at the polls.
Hartosh Singh Bal is political editor of Open Magazine and co-author of “A Certain Ambiguity.''
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