S. SUBRRAMANIUM

In a vocational training class at a Gender Resource Centre at Kalkaji in New Delhi.

URBAN poverty has many peculiarities. The academic Aditya Nigam, while describing the underbelly of the national capital in a recent scholarly indictment of the increasing class antagonisms, showed how the imaginary, destructive monkey man that hit the headlines regularly in 2001 was symbolic of the social insecurities and economic fears of the city’s poor. It is possible for such fears to get translated into nightmares such as this one. Although the media completely ignored this angle in pursuit of sensationalism, it is now evident that the monkey man was imagined only in cluttered slums or claustrophobic labour colonies across Delhi. A comprehensive government agenda that focussed specifically on the needs of this large section was absent until very recent times.

Often, the urban poor, unlike the rural poor, go unnoticed as the focus is always on infrastructural development as far as the Indian city is concerned. But with a growing poor population and its helplessness in slum-shy Delhi, the one-year-old initiative of the Delhi government, called “Mission Convergence”, seems to be a first-of-its-kind programme that addresses the needs of more than 70 per cent of the city’s population.

The convergence platform brings all the nine social welfare departments of the Delhi government together under a single-window system through Samajik Suvidha Kendras (SSKs) from where beneficiaries can directly access various social welfare schemes such as old-age pension, ration cards of the public distribution system (PDS), and funds of the Delhi government’s Ladli Scheme for the girl child. But what adds to the value of the mission are its vocational training programmes for the poor at Gender Resource Centres (GRCs). Because at the outset it was necessary to find out who the beneficiaries of the mission would be, a full-scale identification of Delhi’s poor was done, and this is the one factor that made the mission successful in its first year of existence.

A separate mechanism is under way to ensure that the poor get their ration cards and have access to the welfare schemes meant for them. A method to locate these people is already in place through an IT-enabled and democratically decentralised delivery system. The mission is headed by Rakesh Mehta, Chief Secretary of Delhi, who is in the State Convergence Forum, below which there is the Programme Management Unit that oversees the District Resource Centres (DRCs) in every district and is run by a mission director. The DRCs, together with a few mother non-governmental organisations (NGOs), monitor the functioning of the GRCs and the SSKs. The lateral structure of the District Convergence Forum and the District Mission Unit ensures that all the departments of the Delhi government work in tandem with the DRCs.

Rakesh Mehta, who is also one of the initiators of the mission, told Frontline: “This is a major governance reform, which seeks to deliver welfare entitlements to the poor as part of their entitlements rather than as dole. This means that it links welfare benefits to livelihoods in a dynamic manner rather than assuming such linkages. Mission Convergence seeks to bring about a partnership between people, community-based organisations and various government departments in such a way that it brings maximum benefits in empowering the community and individuals through a series of interventions, which are a combination of cash-based incentives, in-kind incentives and income-earning training and opportunities.”

What is noticeable is that the survey of the poor did not take the income of a household as a criterion to identify it as vulnerable. The three criteria used were social vulnerability, occupational vulnerability and spatial vulnerability (of the households). “This is crucial, as in Delhi below-poverty-line families are only those who earn less than Rs.24,000 per annum. This excludes a very large section of economically vulnerable people. Proxy indicators were necessary to make this programme more than a mere formality. The first step to go forward was to transcend from the bureaucratic approach to a mission-mode approach,” mission director Rashmi Singh said.

What followed was the Herculean task of going to the field to collect the household data of those who lived in the slums, resettlement colonies and other underdeveloped regions. The survey was not entrusted to a professional agency but was conducted by the same grass-roots organisations (GRCs and SSKs) that had to work amidst these people. The survey becomes unique as for the first time in India the homeless, street children and child-headed households are being counted and included in the survey’s most vulnerable category. The survey found out that only 8.5 per cent of the widow-headed households (most vulnerable) had Antyodya Anna Yojana (AAY) cards. Nearly 54 per cent of the residents of slums and resettlement colonies did not have ration cards.

SHANKER CHAKRAVARTY

Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit at a performance by disabled persons on the first anniversary of Mission Convergence, in New Delhi on August 14.

The SSK survey was coordinated by the Community Health Department of St Stephen’s Hospital with the help of the Programme Management Unit, 78 GRCs, nine DRCs and two mother NGOs. “The idea was that the ownership and accountability of the data should rest with those who were expected to respond to the community’s needs,” Rashmi Singh told Frontline. Until now two phases of the survey have been completed. Of the 42 lakh people from underdeveloped colonies and slums that have so far been covered by the survey, nine lakh households come under the extremely vulnerable category.

During the survey, several pockets of nomadic tribes were found whose members have been living in Delhi for more than 40 years. All this and many such facts are available on the government’s IT-enabled database. Dr Amod of St Stephen’s Hospital said that they hoped that data collection would stabilise and evolve over a period of time. “There are some limitations of a first-time collection, but we are sure that this survey sets a credible platform for an effective decision-making process and [will be] used by other government Ministries and departments for main-streaming community development into an equitable and inclusive paradigm.”

Since the idea was to extend the reach of the programme to the lowest common denominator of society, the mission was designed to be a combination of the efforts of the government and NGO partners. A district-wise approach was adopted, with the Deputy Commissioners (District Collectors) as the focal point of the coordination, monitoring and review of the outreach and developmental efforts in their respective districts. And it is here, Rashmi Singh says, that the programme needed to expand from an NGO approach. “The concerned NGOs were already working in random districts. Our job was to make them responsible and accountable in policy decisions, combine the government’s resource and monitoring strength and their own efficiency. Our DCs and a few mother NGOs were appointed to check the progress of the GRC-SSKs run by the NGOs and monitor them.”

Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit said: “Mission Convergence is a product of the Bhagidari scheme of the Delhi government, which began nine years ago.” The Bhagidari scheme, a government-citizen partnership programme, however, extended mostly to middle- and upper-middle-class resident welfare associations. Through the convergence platform, the partnership extended to the poor of the city, with the local community being at the centre of the action and mobilisation. Through the vocational training programmes, the mission claims to have organised placements under which many women and men have joined tailoring companies, beauty parlours, toy-making companies, and so on.

“Mission Convergence is working on developing a family development/vulnerability index on the lines of the human development index,” Rashmi Singh said. She said this would help the government identify the extent of vulnerability at the household level across the city and prioritise resources for vulnerable sections of society. Under the scheme, people who have been identified under the entitlement category will be given a biometric card, which can be used as a ration, travel, health care and identification card.

She further said that the seeds of the mission were sown at an international workshop held in Delhi in May 2008. At this workshop, issues such as the criteria for identifying the poor in the context of Delhi’s institutional mechanisms, the roles of community-based organisations, accountability measures, and the role of information technology in streamlining procedures, simplifying access and ensuring greater transparency were discussed. “We drew inspiration from programmes like Bolsa Familia, a poverty alleviation programme of the [President] Lula government in Brazil that has reduced income inequality and poverty by 25 per cent in four years, Opportunidas in Mexico and a Kerala State poverty eradication programme called Kudumbashree. But we wanted to create a scheme that would specifically address the problems of Delhi’s poor, and so we made some modifications to fit the mission into Delhi’s context,” Rashmi Singh said.

For instance, the single-window and single-register concept was derived from Brazil and making Deputy Commissioners a part of the access system was derived from Kerala, but the concept of community resource persons as the prime mobilisers of the mission through a local NGO is an original idea.

Rakesh Mehta said, “There are 40 schemes under nine departments, and Rs.350 crore is allotted every year for this, but not much reached the poor people. It is through this programme we have managed to increase our efficiency and, thus, plan to increase our funds for social expenditure as the mission also looks forward to discovering more ways to empower people of Delhi.” He said that the mission was also well received by bureaucrats as they were rediscovering themselves as leaders. However, despite its one year of successful run, the mission has run into controversy.

A large group of legislators oppose the mission on the grounds that it has snatched power away from the representatives of the people and that they have no role to play in the programme. Earlier the signature and recommendations of legislators were considered necessary for the issuance of welfare schemes to people. So the Delhi Assembly has witnessed huge uproars over the issue. The debate is centred around the managerial way of the mission’s functioning, which amounts to the exclusion of the political class. However, Rashmi Singh says that the opposition to the mission will die down once it takes a proper shape. “A change generally invites different kinds of responses,” she said.

Mission adviser and Supreme Court Commissioner N.C. Saxena told the media: “Leave aside welfare, the State is, in fact, hostile to the urban poor through various rules and regulations. We must support the programme as only the Delhi government came up with such an idea of a survey. The difference shows. Four years ago, not even one AAY card had been distributed in Delhi and today 2.5 crore cards have already been distributed. The National Sample Survey data say that only 4 per cent of the people in Delhi are poor, but the survey conducted by the mission shows that the poor exceed more than 20 per cent in the national capital.” The planning department of the SSKs also came up with the recent data that indicate that the sex ratio in Delhi has been inverted (it is now 1,004 females:1,000 males).

In a political context where social expenditures for the poor are minimal and right-to-food activists are demanding universalisation of the PDS and more social security measures for the poor, a mission like this seems to be a welcome step. However, it remains to be seen whether it will fulfil all that it has promised.