What is the issue?
- Claims of having achieved inclusion by operationalizing the JAM trinity appear somewhat exaggerated.
- JAM achieved equality in the digital space but it failed to empower Indians in which they are severely deprived.
What is JAM?
- JAM, deriving from Jan Dhan, Aadhaar and Mobile, combines bank accounts for the poor.
- Eliminating leakage in the transfer of benefits and enabling the poor to have bank accounts are worthy objectives of JAM.
- Aadhaar is the pivot here, allowing the government to ensure that benefits reach the poor and enabling them to make payments through ordinary mobile phones.
- JAM ensures seamless transfer of welfare payments and facilitates the making payments in real time.
- It is believed that the JAM revolution can link all Indians into one common financial, economic, and digital space.
What are the issues with JAM?
- JAM had worthy objectives, but fall well short of the social revolution.
- The potential of the JAM trinity for bringing about either of these conditions for economic inclusion is limited.
- JAM functions in the digital space while much of our life is lived in the brick and mortar world.
What are the areas needs improvement?
- Economy - The latest GDP growth in the first quarter of the current financial year to be lower than the average for 2016-17.
- There appears to be a mismatch between the government’s own assessment of its policies and the private sector’s valuation of their worth.
- Banking -It is critical that a largely nationalised banking sector had done very little to extend banking services to the poor till recently.
- A financial inclusion has almost been achieved but economic inclusion needs lots of efforts.
- Ease of doing business - Economic reforms demands the firms to producer services ranging from water supply to waste management.
- When private entities do provide these producers services they tend to be expensive, deterring their off-take.
- Infrastructure -recent incidents of child deaths, meagre flood management in metros, and failure of waste management shows the poor governance and needs serious discourse.
- The possibility of leveraging IT to transform the ecosystem of production for firms and the ecosystem of living for individuals is limited.
How the issues can be addressed?
- Significant element in ensuring inclusion is to maintain, directly or indirectly, the level of demand in the economy.
- The potential workers must be endowed with the capabilities to address the demands.
- The public provision of producer services should be an essential part of public policy, and must be provided by the government.
- Social revolution will arrive when all Indians are empowered through an equality of capabilities.
- The society needs universal health and education infrastructure accessible to all.
- Empowerment in the brick and mortar space would require public infrastructure on a gigantic scale.
- This would require committing resources to building the requisite social and physical infrastructure and investing time to govern its functioning.
Source: The Hindu