PEOPLE respond to incentives. But as economists have long recognised, often not in the way they were supposed to. Take an odd Indian phenomenon: bank branch managers have personally been donating tiny amounts of money to their own customers. Their aim was to please their political masters by boosting the usage rates of a government scheme to bring banking to the poor.

“The One-Rupee Trick”, as it was dubbed by the Indian Express newspaper, which uncovered it this week, is a hare-brained attempt by bankers to spare politicians’ blushes. In 2014 a bold financial-inclusion plan known as Jan Dhan (whose full name translates as “Prime Minister’s People’s Wealth Scheme”) was launched by the newly elected prime minister, Narendra Modi. It promised basic bank accounts for all Indians. Hundreds of millions of accounts were opened. But as with past schemes, many remained unused.

Then the scheme seemed to take off. The proportion of such “zero-balance” accounts began to fall, from roughly half a year ago to under a quarter at the end of August. The apparent success was trumpeted widely, including by Mr Modi. But it is now clear a large part of the decline was fictitious. A cheap way to massage the figures was to deposit as little as one rupee (1.5 cents) into each account. Many bank managers used their own money.

So far, over 10m one-rupee accounts have been found at 34 banks, out of 240m accounts opened since 2014. One, Punjab National Bank, had boasted that only 9% of its 13.6m Jan Dhan accounts were zero-balance. It was forced to admit that a whopping 29% had only one rupee, and a further 5% no more than ten rupees.

The vast majority of the fiddling was at state-owned banks. Many are struggling and have either been rescued by a government bail-out or may need one soon—not the ideal time for a bank boss to admit he has failed to keep a flagship government promise. Some bank bosses were reported as having complained about “pressure” from above.

The revelation lends credence to claims that big poverty-reduction schemes are often mainly public-relations exercises. That is a shame: Jan Dhan is part of a sensible attempt to move away from inefficient subsidies of staples such as rice and kerosene to deposits made directly into poor people’s bank accounts. For now, all many poor Indians have to show for it is a single rupee.