Amitabh Shukla
New Delhi, March 5
The Delhi government has belatedly realized that its welfare schemes, on which crores of tax payer’s money is spent, does not reach the intended beneficiary. It has decided to overhaul its welfare schemes in entirety and has proposed to create a database and introduce Smart Cards for the beneficiaries so that its impact can be monitored.
“We do not have a very accurate figure of people below poverty or homeless persons, but the need for accurate assessment on continuous basis of the number of people below poverty and nature of poverty needs to be made,” said a government note.
The Delhi Cabinet, in its meeting scheduled for Friday is likely to pass a proposal wherein all schemes of social services would be practically merged and monitored with the help of the Non Government Organisations (NGOs). To be called “Mission convergence of social services”, it has been decided to devolve the work of implementation at the lowest level rather than at the level of the Head of Department. From now on the family would be the focus and not the scheme itself.
“We have realized that over a period of time, the benefits are not reaching where it should. With this, we plan to rationalize all benefits which the people of weaker sections get in the city,” said a senior government official.
At present, there are eight departments which implement social welfare entitlement schemes. These are departments of Health, Education, Social Welfare, Women and Child Development, SC/ST Welfare, Food and Supply, Labour and Urban Development through the civic bodies. The schemes include those pertaining to old age assistance, widow assistance, scholarship and stipend to physically handicapped, subsidy on school uniform text books etc,. Pension to the needy and subsidized ration too fall in this category.
“Each of these departments is seen to be ‘doing their own thing in implementing various schemes,” a government note on the subject said. On the reasons for the convergence of all schemes under one umbrella, it said, “There is no coordination or focus on the family. This makes it difficult to assess the quality of the intervention for the family,” the note added.
After the scheme is implemented, most of the funds would be released at the level of the SDM, NGOs would be engaged in the exercise and an IT backbone would be created. Moreover, the NGOs would be responsible for actual implementation at ground level.
A senior official said: “Mission convergence would create a society for enabling the engagement of NGOs, deployment of funds, holding of data on entitlement categories and release of welfare entitlements to various persons”.
(2008)
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