Indian Government Policies : Why they fail to help the people of India

As I write, the world is fighting to control the Coronavirus outbreak, a human tragedy that has cost millions of lives and brought suffering to families and across entire communities. The pandemic is a horror not only for the directly affected by the virus but also for every citizen. And the indirect, behavioral effects of this crisis—slowing business activity, falling wages, and rising food prices—will make life
tremendously strenuous for lakhs of people who are already under significant poverty in affected regions.
Some of these behaviours can not be avoided, Corona is a disease that affects us all but quarantines and other such measure are equally important so as to push back against the virus. Although simultaneously, it is evident that the responses of masses to the pandemic, in India and rest of the world, are to some degree caused by stigma, false understanding of how the virus spreads, fear-mongering in sections of media, and some biases. Unfortunately, all this has happened before and we have seen it play out similarly with other pandemics and epidemics such as the SARS and H1N1 influenza, and it is probably bound to repeat when the next outbreak strikes. Societies are prone to forget what happened, and policymakers tend to focus on the most socially prominent risks, which are not always those that drive disease outbreaks. In light of this outbreak, the question of the implementation of government policies and the issues that hinder development could not be more appropriate.
As a developing country Indian government has always focused on human development which is led forward by economic development which reflected in the post 1990 boost in human capital development which followed the liberalisation of the Indian economy. But enrichment of the human capital is still hindered pertaining to the pervasive astronomical levels of malnutrition, illiteracy, poverty and income disparity throughout the Indian population. And the main problem is the absence of a proper social security net like the right to elementary education, right to basic health care, right to work and the poor population's hesitance and inability in availing the available social programs. Further, ahead we shall discuss some of the government policies and interventions and why they do not yield desired results.

RTE Act, 2009: The RTE Act, 2009 became a law to operationalise the elemental Right enshrined under the Constitution within Article 21A, which the 86th amendment made possible. The RTE Act became operational from April 2010. A number of it's goals included providing free and compulsory education to each child within the age bracket of 6-14 during a neighborhood
school, till the completion of education , non-admitted children to be admitted to a category appropriate to his age and empowerment of the weaker section by making provisions which necessitate schools to require 25% of their class strength from the weaker section of the society.

Rashtriya Uchchatar Shiksha Abhiyan (RUSA) : The country will substantially increase the amount of candidates in education in next 7 years. The HRD ministry's presented plan hoped that: -
1.The scheme will increase the Gross Enrolment Ratio(GEP) from 18% to 30%.
2.The scheme estimated to cost Rs.99,000 crore will include other existing schemes within the sector.
3. The scheme emphasizes to market reforms within the State education system by creating an civil right playground facilitating institutional structure for planning and monitoring at the state level.
4. it'll help to market autonomy in state universities and include governance within the institutions.
5. it'll also enable conversion of a number of the schools into research universities at par with the best within the world.

The National Population Policy 2000 — It aims to bring the entire birthrate (TFR) to replacement level by 2010 and to realize a stable population by 2045, at A level according to sustainable economic process , social development, and environmental protection.

Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) : The Act was notified on 7 September 2005 and is aimed toward providing livelihood security through employment for the agricultural poor.

And the most up-to-date Coronavirus interventions which failed miserably just like the rest of these policies.

Issues, failures and reasons : 

In all countries, whether developed or under development, problems arise with the implementation of policies. Even with relatively good administrative structures, public policies often do not have their intended impact due to either theoretical or political problem or both. Effective implementation requires a sequence of command, and therefore the capacity to coordinate and control; often there is inadequacy during this very step of implementation, more so in a rising country like India which might be seen presently since the foremost destructive effects of Covid-19 in India have not been the consequences of the disease, but the character of the government's response.
As the government patted itself on the back proclaiming to have implemented the most rigorous lockdown globally, the lockdown ravaged the country's economy and millions were forced below poverty line, yet it failed to control virus transmission. Similarly:
India's population policy (2000)
lacks an adequate policy design. The issues of policy structure in this specific policy consist of ambiguous and ill-described goals and inadequate measures and initiatives to acquire the said objectives. Political timidity and inadequacy, and insufficient social support are other reasons. 
These problems in policy design are partly a product of the compound of centre and state friction and appeasement politics that constraints and limits policy as an instrument to appease certain groups rather than a structured policy, geared towards achieving better outcomes.

Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) : Being one of the most astronomical policy failures MGNREGA deserves a mention when we're talking about failures. The top reasons for it's failures could be owed to ridiculous wage rates, regular payment delays and workers being penalised for administrative lapses. MGNREGA's wage rate in 17 states is currently lower than the corresponding state minimum wage. Several court verdicts have declared that MGNREGA's wages must not be lower than the state agricultural minimum wage. The absurdly low wages fazed workers' interest in MGNREGA projects. Such problems could be attributed to the following factors:
- lack of flexibility in design to give the implementing bodies adequate choices to work with
- state's inadequate infrastructure to effectively record demand
- lack of awareness among wage seekers
- inconsistency in availability of work

What can be done?

In his book, "Poor Economics",  MIT economist Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee talks about the importance taking projects one at a time. One big push at everything is not a solution suggested by economist and it just results in failure, proper focus to make one project a success is what's needed.
On a question regarding the failing Public Distribution System(PDS) he responded that there are several important factors that have been ignored while implementing PDS, first of them would be to recognize that dumping grains of people wouldn't necessarily result in better nutrition and a holistic approach to increase the standard of living through better nutritious food is what's needed.
The government fails to connect itself with the public and ground realities and sets unrealistic expectations just before the elections in order to obtain political gains. Fixing that is expected to fix the implementation problems of Indian social programs.