Application delays are a major bottleneck in enrolment for social protection schemes

Delays featured prominently in schemes where enrolment protocols were decentralised.

In schemes such as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), the Pradhan Mantri Matru Vandana Yojana (PMMVY), and the Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY), the primary channel of enrolment is a community member with close ties to prospective beneficiaries.

Forty percent of MGNREGS applicants who experienced some issue while enrolling for the scheme reported that the Gram Rozgar Sahayak did not respond to or accept their applications.

Similarly, 38 percent of PMMVY and 18 percent of JSY applicants with some enrolment issues reported delays in application submissions by the ASHA worker or Anganwadi Sevika.

These delays occur for several reasons. First, the enrolment points may be overburdened with a gamut of time-sensitive responsibilities of multiple schemes at once, which prevents them from processing applications timely.

We learned through fieldwork that ASHA workers sometimes accumulated enough maternity benefit applications to justify the cost of travelling to the block office to process them further. Such ad hoc protocols may ease the ASHA worker’s burden, but cause delays for beneficiaries.

Further, there are insufficient mechanisms to ensure that beneficiaries are proactively informed about their application status. Beneficiaries often could not pinpoint the exact reason for application delays and required assistance with information discovery. Such information asymmetry makes it less likely that citizens might hold their enrolment points accountable, encouraging service denial and delay.

For specific schemes such as PM-Kisan, temporary enrolment camps are often set up at the village/taluk level. Although this is a valiant effort, they often operated erratically without providing citizens receipts or application numbers, making it challenging for citizens to track their application status.

Finally, we found evidence of higher-level bureaucratic delays that may cause an application to be unprocessed. For instance, a block-level officer from Samastipur, Bihar, indicated that many applications made in 2013 for priority household ration cards were processed only in 2020 due to the government’s focus on deduplicating beneficiaries and applications during the time.

We make the following policy recommendations to make the enrolment processes more inclusive.

1)     Improve channels of communication with the citizen:

The delivery system must proactively communicate the citizen’s application status, the reason for its pendency/rejection, and the number of days elapsed since application submission. This may be operationalised in the following ways: SMS notifications, IVR calls, or the release of lists of successful and failed registrations at the Panchayat level. Further, scheme-specific helpline numbers may enable citizens to track applications in real time in an offline mode.

2)    Enhance the functional capacity of enrolment points:

Enrolment points such as CSCs (common service centres) or local government functionaries (such as the lekhpal, patwari, or any Panchayat member) may be provided visibility over citizen application and complaint status. Local access points are citizens’ predominant avenues for accessing information and grievance redress. Enabling them to provide citizens with up-to-date information regarding application status can solve the information asymmetry at the last mile. In doing so, the system fosters transparency on behalf of enrolment points.

3)    Strengthen grievance redressal systems:

Without responsive grievance redressal systems, other policy changes will fail to achieve the desired results of inclusivity and transparency. To bring grievance redress to the last mile, we recommend monthly Panchayat sessions be conducted to resolve social protection grievances. This will provide citizens with a platform to air grievances in a community setting. Block-level officials should preside over such sessions and officially register grievances in an online repository. We also recommend the creation of a common grievance redressal cell for all DBT schemes across tiers. This will equip the administrator with aggregate-level statistics on the corresponding root causes of all types of grievances, allowing them to identify which aspects of the enrolment process require correction.

Aishwarya Narayan is a Research Associate at the Social Protection Initiative at Dvara Research. She has been looking into the intersection of social protection and digital systems and has recently concluded a project exploring the documentation of exclusion from welfare schemes and corresponding grievance redressal systems.