Social Security may provide cash benefits to persons faced with 1. Sickness and disability 2. Unemployment 3. Crop failure 4. Loss of the marital partner Select the correct answer using the codes given below :

Correct — D, (d) 1, 2, 3 and 4.

READ THE STEM'S VERB FIRST. It says social security "MAY provide cash benefits to persons faced with" — not "must", and not "in India does". The question is about the RANGE of contingencies against which cash social security is capable of protecting people, and a permissive verb sets a wide test. Each of the four items has to be judged against that test, and all four pass it.

ITEM 1 — SICKNESS AND DISABILITY. These are among the oldest contingencies covered anywhere. Sickness benefit replaces wages lost during a spell of illness; invalidity or disablement benefit provides an income where a person's earning capacity is permanently reduced. Both are cash benefits, distinct from the medical care that may accompany them. In India the Employees' State Insurance scheme pays both — sickness benefit during certified illness, and temporary and permanent disablement benefit for employment injury — and the Employees' Pension Scheme framed under the provident fund legislation pays a disablement pension of its own.

ITEM 2 — UNEMPLOYMENT. Unemployment benefit is a classic branch of social security, and it is a CASH benefit by its nature, since the loss it meets is a loss of earnings. India's provision is narrower than that of many countries but it is real: an unemployment allowance is payable under the Employees' State Insurance scheme to an insured person who loses employment through the closure of a factory, retrenchment or permanent invalidity, and the rural employment guarantee legislation provides for an allowance where work is not supplied within the prescribed period.

ITEM 4 — LOSS OF THE MARITAL PARTNER. This is the SURVIVORS' contingency, and cash benefits for it are among the most widespread of all: a widow's or widower's pension, a dependants' benefit, a death-linked insurance payment. In India the Employees' Pension Scheme pays a widow's pension and children's pension; the Employees' State Insurance scheme pays a dependants' benefit where death results from employment injury; the deposit-linked insurance scheme pays an assurance on death in service; and the national social assistance programme includes a widow pension and a family benefit on the death of the breadwinner.

ITEM 3 — CROP FAILURE. This is the item the question really turns on, and it deserves a careful answer. It is NOT one of the nine branches listed in the international minimum-standards framework, which names medical care, sickness, unemployment, old age, employment injury, family, maternity, invalidity and survivors' benefits. But the stem is not asking which contingencies that framework lists; it is asking what social security may provide cash benefits for. Social security, in its broad and standard definition, is protection against economic distress caused by a substantial stoppage or reduction of earnings. For a cultivator, whose earnings are the crop, a failed harvest is precisely such a stoppage — the exact counterpart of unemployment for a wage earner. And cash is in fact paid against it: crop insurance schemes, from the national agricultural insurance arrangements onward to the present crop insurance scheme, pay a claim when the yield falls short of a threshold, and calamity relief provides ex gratia payments after a widespread failure. Indian writing on social security for the unorganised sector consistently names crop failure among the risks against which the agricultural worker needs protection, precisely because the employment-linked branches of the international list do not reach him.

So all four items describe contingencies for which social security may provide cash benefits, and the answer is option (d).

A NOTE ON THE FORM. The stem is an unfinished sentence ending on the words "faced with", with no punctuation, and the numbered items complete it — a construction this paper uses in several places. Each item is a noun phrase and none ends in a full stop.

Why the others are wrong

• (a)1, 2 and 3 only — This set accepts sickness and disability, unemployment and crop failure, and rejects the loss of the marital partner — which is the least defensible exclusion of the four. The survivors' contingency is one of the most universally covered risks in the whole of social security and the one for which cash benefits are most obviously appropriate, since the loss suffered by a family on the death of an earning member is precisely a loss of income. It is a named branch of the international minimum-standards framework, and Indian law provides for it several times over: a widow's pension and a children's pension under the Employees' Pension Scheme, a dependants' benefit under the Employees' State Insurance scheme where death results from employment injury, an assurance under the deposit-linked insurance scheme on death in service, and a widow pension and a family benefit under the national social assistance programme. A candidate reaching this option has generally read "loss of the marital partner" as a personal rather than an economic event, and has missed that it is the survivors' branch under an unfamiliar name.
• (b)1, 2 and 4 only — This set is the most carefully constructed of the three wrong options, because it is exactly the answer that the narrow international list would give: sickness and invalidity, unemployment and survivors' benefits are all named branches of that framework, and crop failure is not. A candidate who has learnt the nine branches and applies them mechanically will arrive here, and the reasoning is respectable as far as it goes. What it overlooks is the stem's own wording. The question asks what social security MAY provide cash benefits for, not which contingencies appear in a particular international instrument, and the broad definition of social security — protection against a substantial stoppage or reduction of earnings — plainly covers the failure of a cultivator's crop. Cash is paid against that risk in practice, through crop insurance claims and through calamity relief, and the literature on social security for the unorganised sector treats it as a standard contingency. The list of nine is a minimum standard for employment-linked schemes, not an exhaustive definition of the subject.
• (c)3 and 4 only — This set keeps crop failure and the loss of the marital partner while rejecting sickness and disability and rejecting unemployment, which inverts the subject. Sickness and invalidity benefits are among the earliest social-security provisions ever enacted anywhere and are covered in India by the Employees' State Insurance scheme and by the Employees' Pension Scheme; unemployment benefit is a named branch of every standard classification of the subject and is provided in India, if narrowly, through an unemployment allowance for insured persons and through the rural employment guarantee. To exclude both while admitting the two less conventional items is to have the picture the wrong way round. The option's likely origin is a reading of the item as a puzzle rather than as a question of substance — the assumption that the two obvious-looking statements must be the traps and the two unusual ones the answer. Statement lists are not built that way, and each statement has to be judged on what it says.

SOCIAL SECURITY IS DEFINED BY THE CONTINGENCIES IT MEETS, and learning the subject means learning that list of contingencies and the instruments attached to each.

THE INTERNATIONAL MINIMUM STANDARD recognises NINE branches, and they are worth memorising in a fixed order because list questions are far easier to answer against a remembered list than against a general impression:

medical care · sickness benefit · unemployment benefit · old-age benefit · employment injury benefit · family benefit · maternity benefit · invalidity benefit · survivors' benefit

Of these, medical care is a benefit in kind; the rest are principally cash benefits, which is why the stem's phrase "cash benefits" does not narrow the field very much.

THE FORM THE PROTECTION TAKES divides into three:

SOCIAL INSURANCE — contributory and pooled, with the benefit defined by the contingency. The Employees' State Insurance scheme is the Indian example. PROVIDENT FUNDS AND PENSIONS — contributory with individual accounts, or contributory with a defined pension. The Employees' Provident Fund and the Employees' Pension Scheme. SOCIAL ASSISTANCE — non-contributory, financed from general revenue and paid on a means or category test. The old-age, widow and disability pensions and the family benefit under the national social assistance programme.

WHY THE NINE BRANCHES DO NOT EXHAUST THE SUBJECT IN INDIA. The international list was built around the industrial wage earner: its contingencies are the events that interrupt a WAGE. The overwhelming majority of Indian workers are not wage earners in that sense — they are cultivators, agricultural labourers, artisans, petty traders and casual workers — and the events that interrupt THEIR earnings include the failure of a crop, the death of a milch animal, the loss of a workplace, and the collapse of demand for a craft. That is why Indian policy has grown a second layer alongside the employment-linked statutes: crop insurance for the cultivator, livestock insurance, the unorganised workers' social security legislation with its schedule of schemes, and the universal insurance and pension schemes delivered through bank accounts. The nine branches remain the reference point, but the subject in India is wider than they are.

CASH AGAINST KIND is a distinction worth keeping. A cash benefit replaces lost income and leaves the recipient to decide how to use it; a benefit in kind — medical treatment, rations, a public works job — supplies the thing directly. Most contingencies can be met either way, and many schemes combine both: the Employees' State Insurance scheme provides medical care in kind and sickness, disablement and dependants' benefits in cash.

THE HISTORICAL FRAME behind all of this is the mid-twentieth-century reconstruction of social protection in Britain and Europe, in which a comprehensive scheme was proposed to meet the great causes of want across the whole of life, and the international minimum standards followed from that thinking a few years later.

Key facts

• The stem uses the permissive "may provide cash benefits", which asks what social security is capable of covering rather than which contingencies a particular instrument lists.
• Sickness and invalidity are classical branches: the Employees' State Insurance scheme pays sickness and disablement benefits, and the Employees' Pension Scheme pays a disablement pension.
• Unemployment benefit is a named branch of social security everywhere; in India an unemployment allowance is payable under the Employees' State Insurance scheme on closure, retrenchment or permanent invalidity.
• The rural employment guarantee legislation also provides for an unemployment allowance where work is not supplied within the prescribed period.
• "Loss of the marital partner" is the SURVIVORS' contingency — met by the widow's and children's pensions of the Employees' Pension Scheme, the dependants' benefit under the ESI scheme, deposit-linked insurance and the widow pension and family benefit under the national social assistance programme.
• The international minimum-standards framework recognises nine branches: medical care, sickness, unemployment, old age, employment injury, family, maternity, invalidity and survivors' benefits.
• Crop failure is not among those nine, because the list was built around events that interrupt a WAGE, and the cultivator is not a wage earner.
• On the broad definition of social security — protection against a substantial stoppage or reduction of earnings — a failed harvest is exactly such a stoppage for a cultivator.
• Cash is in fact paid against crop failure through crop insurance claims when yields fall short of a threshold, and through calamity relief after a widespread failure.
• Indian policy for the unorganised sector has deliberately extended protection beyond the employment-linked branches, which is the shift this item reflects.

Common traps

• Applying the nine international branches as though they were an exhaustive definition. They are a minimum standard for employment-linked schemes, not the boundary of the subject.
• Missing the modal verb. "May provide" asks what social security can cover, not what any one statute in fact covers.
• Reading "loss of the marital partner" as a personal event rather than as the survivors' contingency under an unfamiliar name.
• Assuming India has no unemployment provision at all. It is narrow, but an unemployment allowance exists under the ESI scheme and under the rural employment guarantee.
• Treating the obvious-looking statements in a list as traps and the unusual ones as the answer. Each statement has to be judged on what it says.
• Confusing cash benefits with benefits in kind. Medical care is in kind; the sickness, disablement and dependants' benefits that accompany it are cash.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following is among the nine branches of social security recognised by the ILO's Social Security (Minimum Standards) Convention, 1952 ?

  • (a)Survivors' benefit
  • (b)Housing benefit
  • (c)Education benefit
  • (d)Legal aid

  Answer(a) Survivors' benefit — the nine branches are medical care, sickness, unemployment, old-age, employment injury, family, maternity, invalidity and survivors' benefits. Housing, education and legal aid are important public services but are not branches of that framework.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Under which one of the following is a cash unemployment allowance payable to an insured person who loses his employment through the closure of a factory or through retrenchment ?

  • (a)The Employees' Provident Fund Scheme, 1952
  • (b)The Employees' State Insurance scheme
  • (c)The Payment of Gratuity Act, 1972
  • (d)The Maternity Benefit Act, 1961

  Answer(b) The Employees' State Insurance scheme — the unemployment allowance for insured persons who lose employment on closure, retrenchment or permanent invalidity is provided within the ESI framework. The provident fund pays an accumulation, gratuity is a terminal payment for long service, and the Maternity Benefit Act covers a different contingency altogether.