According to a recent media report more than a quarter of eligible households are not getting the benefits from the much -outed Social Safety Net Programmes (SSNPS). The reports also stated that many non-eligible households are getting the benefit. Obviously safety nets are welcome in a country where, until now, governments in general have failed to carry the poor with them.  Most developed nations have what is called a ‘social safety net’ — a combination of legislation and tax-funded government initiatives aimed at protecting the weakest and most vulnerable members of society. A few are all-encompassing, and some Scandinavian countries have what is known as ‘womb to tomb’ care for their citizenry.
In Bangladesh there are big challenges in implementation of such programmes that include setting the eligibility criteria in practice, scarcity of resources, demand-supply gap, elite involvement at the local level, and unresponsiveness to changes in people’s needs. However, corruption being a single largest factor has surpassed all these challenge. In countries like Bangladesh there always is an economically weaker segment vulnerable to the poverty trap.
So the introduction of Social Safety Nets (SSNs) as an interim measure can help break the vicious cycle of poverty. The allocation of public expenditure on SSNPs has steadily been increasing over the recent years. They are necessary to alleviate poverty in an economy that takes a long time to trickle down benefits to the poor and disadvantaged. Special programmes for poverty alleviation are therefore necessary. Containing poverty is inevitable in a sense that if it is left unchecked it might gradually take into its fold the relatively well-off sections as well. Poverty and prosperity simply can’t go together. Apart from a moral justification of helping the poor, there is strong macroeconomic justification for Social Safety Nets as well.
In Bangladesh the failure to support large numbers of poor and vulnerable people is leaving them exposed to risks and unexpected difficulties like unemployment, ill health and natural disasters. Evidently a large number of people are still not getting the benefits of the SSN programmes due to the presence of targeting errors, corruption, weak monitoring and faulty selection criteria. The extreme poor are yet to get the optimal benefits from the programmes. The number of beneficiaries would be higher if the government could solve the targeting errors.