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Bare Necessities Index (BNI)
Read more on - Polity | Economy | Schemes | S&T | Environment
- Economic Survey's bare necessities: Despite the widespread efforts and improvements, inequalities in access to bare necessities like drinking water, sanitation, hygiene and housing conditions continue to exist between urban and rural India. The above inference is drawn from the Economic Survey for 2020-21 in its newly constructed “Bare Necessities Index” (BNI).
- Key points: The BNI is built on the idea of Thalinomics in the Economic Survey for 2019-20, through which it had sought to examine the access to food in the country. The Survey underlined the need to focus on reducing variations in the access to bare necessities across states, between rural and urban areas, and between income groups. In this digital era, the bare necessities are no more confined to “Roti, Kapda aur Makan” but goes beyond it. Access to technology, smartphones, internet and connectivity with the whole nation are the newly added bare necessities to go hand in hand with the world.
- Thalinomics: In the 2019-20 Economic Survey, Thalinomics was introduced to make an attempt to relate economics to the common person using something that an individual encounters every day - a plate of food i.e a Thali. Affordability of Thalis vis-à-vis a day’s pay of a worker has improved over time, indicating improved welfare of the common person.
- Bare Necessities Index: It is based on the large annual household survey data, and constructed using suitable indicators and methodology at district level for all/targeted districts. It summarises 26 indicators on five dimensions - water, sanitation, housing, micro-environment, and other facilities and has been created for all states for 2012 and 2018 using NSO data. It classifies areas on three levels of access- high, medium, low to bare necessities.
- Utility: It will help check inter state disparities or a progress of a particular state over time, and also check the efficacy of policies/ schemes implemented to meet these bare necessities.
- Learning: Bare necessities have improved across all States in the country in 2018 as compared to 2012. Increase in equity is noteworthy as the rich can access private options for public goods.
- Steps taken: Many steps include Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana and Saubhaggya yojana for housing, PM-JAY and National Health Mission for the health sector, increased allocations for some of the bare necessities in the budget 2020-21 such as the health, PM eVIDYA, Swayam Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and PRAGYATA in the educational sector, Aatmanirbhar Bharat Rozgar Yojana (aimed at incentivising the creation of new employment opportunities during the Covid-19 economic recovery phase) etc.
- Sustainable Development Goals Index: NITI's SDG index documents the progress made by India’s States and Union Territories towards achieving the 2030 SDG targets.
- Multiplicity of schemes: There are about 250-300 poverty alleviation schemes launched by central and state government at the district level which are almost similar in nature. This multiplicity of schemes brings inefficiency within the effective functioning of schemes and opens windows for corruption.
- Summary: The schemes shall be futuristic keeping in mind that the idea of bare necessities have changed over the years and will definitely change even more for the upcoming generation. Digital India and Bharat Net must be accelerated. Quality of schemes should be raised instead of quantity, a few but well organised and effective schemes must be preferred. Convergence of schemes is needed, so that the schemes which are not necessary should be done away with. The newly introduced “digital aspect” of bare needs must be addressed but the traditional needs must not be compromised. The most important traditional bare need is public health which adheres to sewage and sanitation. A medical condition called environmental enteropathy is caused by poor health and sanitation conditions which infects people’s ability to absorb nutrition. Environmental enteropathy (also called tropical enteropathy) is a subclinical condition caused by constant fecal-oral contamination and resulting in blunting of intestinal villi and intestinal inflammation. Every block hospital should be upgraded, upgradation of the hospitals will ultimately lead to the quantum leap in the health services available at the block level.
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