Ramesh Singh Test : Human Development In India - UPSC

• The Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY) is a scheme under the Unorganised Workers' Social Security Act 2008.

• It is a smart card-based cashless health insurance scheme, including maternity benefit, which provides a cover of Rs 30,000 per family per annum on a family floater basis to below poverty line (BPL) families in the unorganised sector.

• It is proposed to extend the RSBY to all unorganised workers in a phased manner.

• Under the Rashtriya Bal Swasthya Karyakram (RBSK), support is being provided to States/UTs for child health screening and early intervention services through early detection and early management of common health conditions.

• The National Iron Plus Initiative has been rolled out to address anaemia among children (6 months to 19 years) and women in reproductive age including pregnant and lactating women in both rural and urban areas throughout the country.

• To improve the availability of drinking water in rural areas, the National Rural Drinking Water Programme (NRDWP) initiated a new project supported by the World Bank, the “Rural Water Supply and Sanitation Project-Low Income States'.

• The project aims to provide a safe, 24 x 7 piped drinking water supply to 7.8 million rural populations in four low-income States—Assam, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Jharkhand.

• In the aftermath of the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2007, India has been trying to come to grips with the 'twin balance sheet' (TBS) problem- (i) High NPAs of the PSBs; and (ii) Highly stressed balance sheet of the private corporate sector.

• The welfare schemes India has implemented have been faced with certain common problem misallocations of funds, wastage and seen inclusion and exclusion factors, ghost beneficiaries corruption, the cost of operating them, etc. being the major ones.

• For this and other reasons, it has been argued to give serious consideration to the idea of the UBI. This will have several merits in it missing the current redistribution schemes, such as:

(i) It will be given from above minimizing several maladies of existing schemes.

(ii) It is less likely to be prone to exclusion errors.

(iii) By directly transferring money to bank accounts, and bypassing multiple layers of bureaucracy

• For farmers' suicides, bankruptcy and in have been cited as a major cause--around 37 per cent of all suicides by the farmers today. Usually, local money-lenders were portrayed as the villain in it.

• But as per the latest National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), 2015 data, 80 percent of the farmers who committed suicides in 2015 due to 'bankruptcy or debts' had borrowed money from institutional sources (banks and registered microfinance institutions).

• This way the risk of bad loans is smoothly transferred from the stressed banks' balance sheet to the bad bank making banks viable to start fresh lending.

• Though this format looks the most suitable one for India's situation, it needs certain arrangements to be put in place, such as setting up a separate body, putting the desired kind of management skill in place, information systems and proper regulatory mechanism being the major ones. This is an expensive model, too.