This paper assesses the role of Swarnajayanti Gram Swarojgar Yojona (SGSY), a government sponsored microfinance programme, as a safety net. The initial survey was conducted in 2006 in Murshidabad District of West Bengal, India while the same households were surveyed again in 2008.  The results show that the programme is well designed to restrict the decline of transient poor or to uplift the chronic poor from below the poverty line. However, there are serious lacunas in implementing the programme. As a result, the SGSY programme as a safety net has failed to fully deliver anticipated benefits to the programme participants. The picture becomes worse if one measures the targeting efficiency of the programme. It is revealed that the “programme” suffers from both inclusion and exclusion errors. The study, however, suffers from the conventional errors of sampling and the limited time frame may not be adequate to measure the full efficacy of the programme.