Ensuring effectiveness of subsidies
Thursday, 8 April 2010
The government must go seriously into the business of devising social security programmes in a manner that will gradually cover all vulnerable groups in the country.
Providing subsidies to the farmers is a crucial necessity. Apparently the figures for subsidies go up regularly, but to what extent such subsidies actually percolate down to the really poor and needy farmers remains a pertinent question. Without ensuring that locally influential and powerful people will not lay their hands on what should be going to the poor, the campaign against poverty or really helping out the producers of agro-goods at the grass roots will not make any headway.
Shireen Haque
Dhanmondi, Dhaka.
Providing subsidies to the farmers is a crucial necessity. Apparently the figures for subsidies go up regularly, but to what extent such subsidies actually percolate down to the really poor and needy farmers remains a pertinent question. Without ensuring that locally influential and powerful people will not lay their hands on what should be going to the poor, the campaign against poverty or really helping out the producers of agro-goods at the grass roots will not make any headway.
Shireen Haque
Dhanmondi, Dhaka.