As the Prime Minister announced the lockdown in order to break the chain of the spread of Coronavirus, one of the major challenges was to meet the economic issues caused by the complete shutdown, except essential services, across the country. The migrant crisis in Delhi showed the kind of bottlenecks that can come up.
A massive relief package of Rs. 1.7 lakh crore was announced by the Centre in order to meet the economic distress caused by the Pandemic, and some of the measures included direct or indirect monetary benefits such as front-loading payment of Rs. 2,000 to farming household enrolled under PM-KISAN in the first month, that is, April.
Other big measures include providing subsidised food to almost every household which is not employed in the formal sector and has stable source income for the next three months and a 50 crore rupees health insurance scheme for the medical workers, who are on the frontlines in country’s fight against the Chinese virus.
Helping India in this massive measure flawless implementation of which is no mean achievement in itself given a history of scams and leakages in such relief measures in the pre-2014 era, is the Good Governance agenda of the Modi government in its first tenure.
A huge database and banking infrastructure have been created during the first tenure of the Modi government with schemes like the Jan Dhan Yojana and Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT).
What facilitates the smooth implementation of relief measures is the 38 crore Jan Dhan Yojana bank accounts which has made it possible to make payments directly into the bank accounts of the targeted population, minimising the scope of leakages that are associated with cash payments and also reducing the workload on authorities charged with payment of such relief measures.
Another game-changer from the first tenure of the Modi government, facilitating the ongoing lockdown, is the Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT)- a huge innovation in the sector of public service delivery system.
With the Supreme Court allowing Aadhar card details to be used for Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT), a number of social welfare schemes were converged with Aadhar details which has helped the government in eliminating undeserving and ghost beneficiaries from important government schemes.
What DBT and Aadhar systems have also done is create a huge and reliable data base that can now be used for targeting large swathes of population that will be benefitting from the relief measures being released both by the Central and State governments.
Take, for instance, the debate for Univeral Basic Income (UBI) in the policy circles of the country, and discussions about linking UBI with Aadhar. While UBI may be a proposal for the future days, what Aadhar linkage has done is facilitate the payment of wages to daily wage earners and labourers who are bound to be the hardest hit by the ongoing lockdown.
In Uttar Pradesh alone, the Yogi government has announced a financial package to the tune of Rs 353 crore that would entail payments to 3.53 million daily wage earners, and this would not be a huge logistical nightmare only due to the Aadhar-linked DBT schemes.
The population that must be targeted has been already benefitting under schemes like the Ujjwala Yojana that aims at penetrating the use of Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) among the rural household and the underprivileged families, only due to the roaring success of the Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) scheme.
What has also helped India in enforcing and successfully implementing the lockdown is the emergence of Prime Minister Modi as easily the tallest leader in the country. The United States under the Trump administration, or Australia under the leadership of Scott Morrison, were not able to enforce social distancing because they were clearly not as inspiring as the Indian Prime Minister.
Prime Minister Modi has an image of a decision-maker, he not only takes tough decisions in the larger national good but also enforces them effectively and adroitly- from Demonetisation to GST to Balakot, Prime Minister Modi is the man who delivers and delivers big when needed.
No matter what his detractors say, it is accepted within India and abroad that if someone could have united a people into observing the lockdown willingly and responsibly, then it is the magnanimous Prime Minister of India Narendra Damodardas Modi.
He is a phenomenal uniting force and a capable administrator, glimpses of which were already seen during the Janta Curfew when the entire nation cutting across religious, casteist and regionalist lines united to observe social distancing. It is this magnanimity, coupled with the governance reforms of Modi government 1.0 that have successfully got us through the lockdown, and hopefully steered us clear of the COVID-19 outbreak.