Who are the beneficiaries of Annapurna Yojana ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (3), 'Senior citizens who are not under National Old Age Pension Scheme'. The Annapurna Scheme was launched with effect from 1 April 2000 by the Ministry of Rural Development to close a specific and easily overlooked gap in India's old-age welfare provision. The National Old Age Pension Scheme, which forms part of the National Social Assistance Programme, pays a monthly pension to indigent elderly people, but it has always been a targeted scheme with a limited number of sanctioned beneficiaries in each state, so that a person could satisfy every condition of eligibility and still receive nothing simply because the state's allocation was exhausted. Annapurna was designed for exactly that category: the destitute senior citizen who qualifies for the old age pension but is not in fact receiving it, whether under the national scheme or a state pension scheme. Such a person is given ten kilograms of foodgrains a month, free of cost, delivered through the state's food and civil supplies machinery and the public distribution system, so the benefit is a food entitlement rather than a cash transfer. The design intention was that no eligible old person should be left entirely without support: if the pension cannot reach them, at least the grain will. That is why the name of the scheme, taken from Annapurna, the goddess associated with food and its abundant provision, points at food security rather than at income. The option text reproduces the scheme's own defining condition — senior citizens who are not covered by the National Old Age Pension Scheme — which is why it is the answer, and why none of the other three groups printed can be.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The name of the scheme is what makes this option tempting, since Annapurna is the goddess of food and a food scheme for children in school is one of the most familiar programmes in the country. But the school feeding programme is a different one: the Mid-Day Meal Scheme, now run as PM POSHAN, provides a cooked meal to children in government and government-aided schools, and it is administered by the education ministry rather than by the rural development ministry. Schemes aimed specifically at girls in school are different again and work through enrolment and retention rather than through grain. The lesson is that the word 'Anna' in a scheme's title identifies the benefit as food, not the beneficiary as a child, and the beneficiary has to be learnt separately.  (b) Casual and unskilled labourers are the target of India's wage employment programmes, not of Annapurna, and the distinction is deliberate rather than accidental. Wage employment schemes are built on the principle of self-selection through work: the household that is willing to do manual labour at the notified wage is presumed to need it, and the guarantee of employment is what delivers the benefit. Annapurna is designed for precisely the people that principle cannot reach — the aged and destitute, who cannot present themselves for manual work at all, and for whom an unconditional entitlement to grain is the only workable form of support. A candidate who chooses this option has probably matched a food benefit to the poorest working group without asking which programme actually carries the name.  (d) Retired soldiers have their own welfare architecture altogether, administered by the Department of Ex-Servicemen Welfare in the Ministry of Defence rather than by the Ministry of Rural Development, and it is built around pensions, resettlement, health care and educational concessions for the ex-serviceman's family. Annapurna carries no service condition of any kind: eligibility turns on age and destitution and on the person's failure to receive the old age pension, and a former soldier drawing a service pension would be excluded by that very condition. This option is in the set as a plausible-sounding welfare category, and it can be eliminated by asking which ministry would run the scheme, since the answer is a different one.

Concept: India's non-contributory social assistance for the poor is organised chiefly under the National Social Assistance Programme, and it is worth holding as a small family of components rather than as a list of names. Its pension components pay a monthly amount to three categories of destitute persons: the elderly under the Indira Gandhi National Old Age Pension Scheme, widows under the Indira Gandhi National Widow Pension Scheme, and persons with disabilities under the Indira Gandhi National Disability Pension Scheme. Alongside them sit a lump-sum death benefit to a bereaved poor household under the National Family Benefit Scheme, and the Annapurna Scheme, which is the only component that delivers food rather than money. Annapurna's position in that family explains its design: it is not an alternative to the old age pension but a residual safety net beneath it, engaged exactly when the pension does not reach someone who qualifies for it. This is a recurring shape in Indian welfare policy — a targeted scheme with a limited number of places, backed by a second scheme that catches those the first cannot accommodate — and recognising the shape makes the individual schemes far easier to remember than learning them one at a time.

State PCS 2023 Q47 — Economy PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2023 Q47 — Economy PYQ with Answer