`Stationary' schemes

Read a report this morning on the Andhra Pradesh state government deciding to give land to flood-affected farmers through a variety of schemes. I imagined a report a few months later that would quote a flood-hit farmer saying that he did not receive any land. I could be wrong, but with my (limited) experience with government schemes, I do know that most of them are rather well-intentioned, but they stay firmly on paper.
I was reminded of a scheme that is still quoted by successive state governments and mentioned in the central government health files on initiatives to improve institutional deliveries among rural women. Called the `Sukhibhava (stay happy if loosely translated)’ scheme, it was meant to encourage women from rural parts of the state (AP) to opt for deliveries in government hospitals or nursing homes. The incentive for them to chuck the mid wife and opt for trained nurses? A princely sum of Rs 300. The well-intentioned scheme wanted to check maternal mortality rate.
To the best of my knowledge, the scheme is still in place. On paper, it is not a bad idea to encourage pregnant women to opt for institutional care, to protect them from possibilities of infections and death. I had my doubts about the incentive amount as even in government hospitals one tends to spend on medicines etc. and wondered whether Rs 300 would be good enough.
A ruckus at a government maternity hospital early last year cleared my doubt. About 200 young women, cradling pink-cheeked infants in their arms, stood in the heat waiting for the promised Rs 300. All of them had opted for a government hospital or a nursing home to deliver their children and claimed that they had spent hundreds on their deliveries. They said the hospital had announced that it would give out the money on that day. The women made long trips from distant areas, spending a couple of hundreds in the process only to be told that the hospital cant give them the money.
I found the hospital superintendent and her staff sitting inside almost oblivious of the commotion across the wall. It was lunchtime, they told me. However, the superintendent said that the hospital had no money to give. The government had announced the date but had not disbursed the money to given to the women. The superintendent was helpless.
So were the women waiting outside. They had spent more than what the government had promised. When I left the hospital after a couple of hours to file my report, the women were still sitting there, their babies were still crying. When I headed home that evening, I wondered if those women, some of whom had exhausted their money on their trip to the hospital, had managed to go back home.