Single women below 60 and the partially disabled who stopped receiving financial assistance after mid-November last year will now receive their social security allowances.

The Department of National ID and Civil Registration, the agency responsible for coordinating the distribution of social security allowances, this week released an additional fund of Rs 3.97 billion to 152 local governments to distribute the allowances to previously left out groups, including single women below 60, partially disabled people, and senior citizens receiving pension from foreign governments.

The local governments were previously allocated Rs11.18 billion. With the addition of funds, local officials now have a total of Rs15.16 billion to distribute a social security allowance. “Other local governments are also expected to demand an extra budget to distribute as social security allowances. So, social security spending will grow significantly this year,” said Jitendra Basnet, director-general at the department.

The 753 local governments in the country are responsible for distributing social security allowances to individual beneficiaries.

Following changes to regulations guiding the implementation of the Social Security Act in March last year, the government had stopped providing the allowance to women aged below 60 if they were receiving pensions from foreign governments and were not found to be in serious need of assistance .

But, the new regulation invited strong protests from the affected as well as lawmakers. It forced the government to continue providing allowances as before. Earlier, the Security Security Act-2018 had made provisions of denying them the allowance. The provision came into implementation in March last year after the regulation was introduced.

After the government agreed to continue the scheme, officials had provided cash in the form of financial assistance to groups who have been bereft of the social security allowance for the last four months of the last fiscal year 2019-20 and first four months of the current fiscal year 2020-21 as a stop gap measure. The assistance provided was equivalent to the allowance they were receiving earlier.

In order to continue providing social security allowance, the government introduced an ordinance in late last year. Based on the ordinance, the department is currently sending the budget to local governments.

“Those who were left out from the social security allowance following the introduction of the regulation, will now get the allowance as usual,” said Basnet.

The government’s move to continue to provide allowance has delighted concerned stakeholders. “Even though partially disabled people had received the fund equivalent to their allowance in the form of financial assistance the last time, continuation of the allowance under the same name has provided an assurance,” said Raju Basnet, general secretary at the National Federation of Disabled-Nepa;. “But, we had to fight for it. As we are demanding an allowance for all he disabled based on the degree of their disability. Depriving the people of the allowance for several years dealt a huge blow to people with disability.”

While distributing allowance in the form of financial assistance, senior citizens receiving pension from foreign government services (around 50,000 people), had denied the allowance as they had an alternative source of income. But after the introduction of the ordinance, they will be entitled to receive the allowance as in the past.

From this fiscal year, the government has added around 500,000 children aged below five years on the list of beneficiaries of social security allowance, according to the department.

Children from 15 districts with low human development status were made beneficiaries of cash transfers in 2018-19. The number of such districts has gone up to 26 this fiscal year.

With the addition, the number of child beneficiaries has reached 1.3 million, according to the department.

As the number of beneficiaries and the amount needed for the social security allowance continue to grow, officials and experts have been questioning its sustainability.

According to the department, the number of people receiving cash transfers as social security allowances has nearly doubled in the last decade, thereby increasing pressure on the state coffers.

The number of beneficiaries reached 3.06 million during the last fiscal year 2019-20 compared to 1.56 million in 2010-11, the department said.

“If the number doubles every 10 years, it will create a huge challenge for the country’s economy,” states the department's annual report for 2019-20. In addition to the growth in the number of beneficiaries, the amount to be provided to each beneficiary has also increased over the years.

Former Auditor General Bhanu Acharya told the Post in early January that the social security scheme must be tied to the state’s capacity to bear long-term liability. “It is not a question of whether social security allowances should be provided, but it’s whether the state is capable of sustaining its growth,” Acharya, also a former finance secretary, had told the Post.