Targeting a Shrinking Welfare Budget
A municipal welfare cell has ₹18,00,000 for a six-month food-support programme. A meal costs ₹30; two meals a day for 30 days cost ₹1,800 per household per month, or ₹10,800 for six months. The cell has 480 applicant households: 320 hold priority ration cards, 60 are migrant workers without local cards, 45 are elderly people living alone, 28 are pregnant or lactating women, and 22 have a disabled member. The existing list contains 70 households with pucca houses and a car, but also 12 elderly people with no family support. The council wants to avoid both leakage and exclusion. It can use the ration-card database, school attendance records, and anganwadi registers, but not a new biometric survey before the monsoon. The cell must decide whom to prioritize, whether to give full or partial support, and how to handle people outside the card database.
1. Calculate the maximum number of households that can receive full support for six months. Show why universal full support is impossible.
Read the worked answer
Cost per household for six months = 2 meals × ₹30 × 30 days × 6 months = ₹10,800. Budget ÷ cost = ₹18,00,000 ÷ ₹10,800 = 166.67, so at most 166 households can get full support. For all 480, the cost would be 480 × ₹10,800 = ₹51,84,000, nearly three times the budget. Even after removing 70 non-poor households, 410 × ₹10,800 = ₹44,28,000, still far above ₹18,00,000. Therefore the cell must target, use partial support, and refer people to other schemes; a first-come-first-served queue would be arbitrary and would likely exclude migrants and people without cards.
2. Propose a priority order and a mixed package that avoids hard exclusion.
Read the worked answer
First deduplicate the vulnerability lists, because a person may be elderly, disabled or pregnant. Tier 1 for full support: elderly living alone (45, including the 12 already listed), pregnant or lactating women (28), disabled-member households (22), and migrants without cards (60), after verification-about 155 people or households if overlaps are removed. At ₹10,800 each, 155 cost ₹16,74,000, leaving ₹1,26,000. Use the remainder for 11 urgent full cases or about 23 one-meal cases, selected by anganwadi, school or health workers. Remove the 70 non-poor from the priority list but protect the 12 elderly among them. For the remaining priority-card households, do not simply reject them: issue a referral slip to the state food scheme, community kitchen or local charity, and record the reason. Publish ward-level totals, not individual sensitive data.
3. What data and appeal safeguards would make this targeting defensible?
Read the worked answer
Use the least intrusive data: ration-card status, anganwadi registers, school attendance and self-declaration, not a new biometric survey. Separate 'eligibility' from 'priority': a household may be eligible but not receive full support this year. Give a written reason and a same-week appeal to a committee that includes a woman member and a social worker. Publish the criteria, ward-wise beneficiary counts and budget maths; keep individual disability and pregnancy data confidential. Recheck the list monthly because migrants move and monsoon needs change. Record any discretion for emergency cases. This makes exclusion transparent and correctable rather than arbitrary, and it protects the council from both leakage and legitimate grievance.