A trickle: Editorial on the lengthening shadow of governmental negligence in welfare

 Data drawn principally from Expenditure Budget documents over the years reveal that India’s welfare template is suffering on account of the lengthening shadow of governmental negligence. A report by a Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education and Women and Child Development on Demand for Grants for School Education highlighted the dismal state of school education and the urgent need for the government to allocate greater funds to the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan: more than 14,000 government schools have shut down between 2020-21 and 2023-24, delivering a blow to the goal of achieving universal education. The mid-day meal, which has worked wonders in improving both nutrition and enrolment for school children, is being starved of funds too, spiking school dropout rates and deepening gender disparities in education. Saksham Anganwadi, meant to address the nutritional needs of children between 6 months and 6 years, pregnant women and lactating mothers apart from adolescent girls from “aspirational districts” — whatever that means — has seen cuts in funding as well, leading to severe institutional shortages in anganwadis. Political wrangling and funds freeze have been reported in the case of the 100 day rural job guarantee programme. There is also an urgent need to review the purse strings for the National Social Assistance Programme, which plays a crucial role in providing benefits to vulnerable constituencies such as the elderly, the disabled and widows.

Taken together, this set of data bares monumental government lapses in supporting what are deemed as public goods. This is catastrophic given the fact that welfare is a moral commitment on the part of the State. Moreover, India’s ambition of being a global economic powerhouse is contingent upon the claimants of its economic wealth being representative. This underlines the need for strengthening — not weakening — its welfare programmes, especially since the infrastructure of the delivery mechanism is mostly in place. The gradual enfeeblement of the State’s investment in welfare may also signal a possibility whose repercussions could be serious for Indian democracy. The emerging, transactional compact on welfare with the underprivileged — provision of basic amenities in return for electoral patronage for the ruling regime — threatens to transform citizens’ rights to a form of favour to be dispensed by whimsical powers that be. This would be an inversion — perversion — of the democratic ethos itself.

Source: The Telegraph, 22/08/25

For a house to become a home

The poor often spurn government housing programmes because they do not want to risk losing their social networks.

Today, a majority of the world’s population lives in cities, and the global urban population is on track to double by 2050.
In much of the developing world, the first residence for a migrant in the city is in the slum. Life here is often fraught with significant health risks. The illegal nature of housing makes slum dwellers susceptible to extortion by slumlords on the one hand and government officers on the other. The fact that slums are often located on prime real estate compounds the problem: Governments lose significant revenues they could otherwise redistribute to the poor.
Reflecting these realities, the agenda of “Make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable”, which was enshrined in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 11, was complemented in the October 2016 Habitat III summit in Quito, Ecuador by a “New Urban Agenda” of giving slum dwellers upgraded housing with basic services by 2030. How to accomplish such ambitious goals? A common approach is to build higher quality, affordable housing for the poor on the city’s periphery. This is a central pillar of the Indian government’s housing initiative, the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY), which aims to achieve “Housing for all by 2022”.
But a report in May last year put the vacancy in urban housing built under the PMAY at 23 per cent. Why are slum dwellers and new urban migrants rejecting this housing? One possibility is the lack of affordable housing finance. In his New Year Eve address to the nation, the prime minister announced two new interest-subsidy schemes under the PMAY; some anticipate further breaks in the upcoming budget. But reality is more complex. In my research with Sharon Barnhardt of Flame University and Erica Field of Duke University, we tracked female beedi workers drawn from Ahmedabad’s slums who had entered a lottery to receive improved housing at far below market cost, 12 km from the city centre. In 2007, 14 years after the lottery winners received their houses, we conducted detailed surveys with lottery participants. Winning the lottery represented a financial windfall and a chance for home ownership in cleaner, safer environs. The monthly mortgage payments, which were guaranteed for 20 years, were roughly half the monthly rent that the lottery participants paid for their slum dwellings. Yet, 34 per cent of the winners chose not to move to the colony. A further 32 per cent returned to the slums within 10 years.
Poor people were turning down an apparent golden opportunity, and it wasn’t because of high interest rates. What’s more, this group represented a best-case scenario, compared to typical PMAY participants: Beedi work is done at home, so one of the family’s earners didn’t face a long commute. In another housing complex in Ahmedabad — where houses were also assigned by lottery — we found only 46 per cent of the winners were living in the units two and a half years after winning the lottery.
Research pointed to the importance of social networks in the housing decisions of the participants. Relative to lottery losers, the winners lived farther from their adult children and saw them less often. They reported feeling isolated, and were six to nine percentage points less likely to know someone they could rely on for borrowing needs. Lottery losers, but not winners, reported receiving money through their social networks during hard times.
Slum dwellers give each other material and psychological support along with informal insurance in ways that, for now, the state cannot provide. Low take-up of PMAY housing suggests that the programme, in its current form, risks some of the same failures as the one we studied. Studies of “Moving to Opportunity” — a programme in the US in the 1990s that gave lottery winners vouchers to move fromhigh- to low-poverty neighbourhoods — provide another useful benchmark. These studies found no financial or employment benefits for participants or their adult children. In our study, we found that lottery winners were not better off on a variety of socio-economic measures, including income, labour force participation, household health outcomes. It may be that such benefits only materialise among those relocated at an early age. A new study on “Moving to Opportunities” uses tax data to show that while those who moved in adolescence showed negative effects, those who moved as children were more likely to attend university and less likely to end up a single parent.
This suggests a need to be more aware of what individuals stand to gain or lose through relocation, and how they will behave, given those tradeoffs. Policies can be designed and tested to allow people to preserve their social networks even as they are relocated. One approach is to move entire communities to new developments. Another is to focus less on relocation and more on giving slum dwellers rights,
investing in the development of slums.

However, such approaches will require greater upfront investment by the government, not in interest-rate subsidies, but in collecting data on the preferences of poor migrants and targetting a smart programme at those who need and want it. The broad strokes the government is making — subsidies directed imprecisely towards the poor and even middle-income recipients — may well lead to more unoccupied units in undesirable locales.
In some cases, local authorities have demolished slums and provided residents with rental subsidies until PMAY housing can be built.
Governments should be aware these are not just rickety structures falling under bulldozers, but also strong and deeply beneficial social networks.

The writer, a professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School, co-directs the Evidence for Policy Design Initiative

 

Source: Indian Express, 30-01-2017

 

U.N. acclaim for Indian anti-hunger activist

The young leaders were selected by the U.N. from more than 18,000 nominations from 186 countries.

Troubled to see the amount of food being wasted in the big, fat Indian weddings, management graduate Ankit Kawatra came up with the solution to redistribute it among the hungry.

Mr. Kawatra, who left his corporate job to start ‘Feeding India’, is among the 17 people selected for the inaugural class of U.N. Young Leaders for Sustainable Development Goals for his initiative.

The young leaders were selected by the U.N. from more than 18,000 nominations from 186 countries.

“I worked in a global business advisory firm for two years. One day, I went to a celebrity wedding where there were around 10,000 people invited for the wedding and more than 35 cuisines were laid for them. I decided to stay back to see what happened with the food. To my shock and despair, heaps of leftover food was thrown straight into the bin which could have fed 5,000 people just that single night,” Kawatra said.

This led him to establish his own NGO Feeding India, which now claims to have fed 1 million meals with a network of 2,000 volunteers across 28 cities of India.

Redistribution of food

They work towards solving hunger and malnutrition in India by redistributing excess food from weddings, corporate, canteens, banquets and households.

As part of the initiative, Mr. Kawatra has undertaken several projects in the past two years. These include ‘The Magic Truck’, a 24X7 refrigerated vehicle moving around the city collecting and donating excess food.

“We have adopted many donation centres, self-run schools and shelter homes for children, elderly and specially-abled. We provide them with nutritious and well balanced meals,” Mr. Kawatra said. — PTI

Keywords: Ankit Kawatra, U.N. recognition, Feeding India

Source: The Hindu, 26-09-2016

Housing for All, But Not Ownership





Migration will make rental housing a necessity

Housing for all by 2022 seems a daunting task but the target is achievable in terms of the number of units built, provided there is proactive policy and revamped institutional mechanism in place. The chief challenge is to locate housing in an overall context of urbanisation, with its attendant challenges of releasing land, town planning, energy efficiency and costs. Further, given the reality of large-scale internal migration along with urbanisation, policy must delink availability of a place to stay from home ownership. That brings into the picture sensible laws to create a vibrant market for rental housing.The present housing shortage nationwide is put at six crore units and rising, but with growing urbanisation, the backlog is likely to increase to 11 crore dwelling units in seven years, as per one recent projection. The cumulative investment requirement is put at $2 trillion, and further that 1.72 lakh hectare of land is likely to be required for urban residences -much of which would need to be affordable for low-income groups.
And, of course, the vast bulk of the re sources would need to be earmarked for urban housing. The fact is that the Centre and the states budget barely $5-6 billion annually for housing and the requirement is of the order of $250-260 billion each year, primarily by way of public-private partnership. Reducing the gestation period of projects through efficient processes would significantly cut costs.
Housing is not just brick and mortar. For buildings to become residences, they have to be situated amidst schools, hospitals, police stations, playgrounds and other amenities, besides a framework of governance. Urban local bodies need to be created -in very many new towns, civil servants man authorities and no local governments exist -and empowered. Independent regulatory oversight is vital too. Updated norms for prefabricated buildings and skills to deploy them are essential. Public housing can be part of the mix. Thanks to overly protenant rent control laws, we have as many as two crore houses lying vacant!

 Great Good Samaritan -"THIS HAPPENS ONLY IN INDIA"
 
I was not aware of the existence of this noble and great man,
Kalyanasundaram, who was honored by US Govt. I feel ashamed that India Govt
has conferred 'Bharat Ratna' on Sachin Tendulkar (many more who do not
deserve at all), who seeks and gets exemption of customs duty on a
'Ferrari' which he got free, who reportedly earns crores of rupees(in
hundreds) every year.
 
Mr.Kalayanasundaram worked as a Librarian for 30 years. Every month in his
30 year experience(service), he donated his entire salary to help the
needy. He worked as a server in a hotel to meet his needs. He donated even
his pension amount of about ten lakh rupees to the needy. He is the first
person in the world to spend the entire earnings for a social cause. In
recognition to his service, the American government honoured him with the
‘Man of the Millennium’ award. He received a sum of Rs 30 crores as part of
this award which he distributed entirely for the needy as usual. Moved by
his passion to help others, Super Star Rajinikanth adopted him as his
father. He still stays as a bachelor and dedicated his entire life for
serving the society. All our Politicians, Film stars, Business magnets,
cricketers Press and we all Indians should be PROUD and also should be
ashamed of ourselves. American Government has honored him but we Indians
even don't know that such a personality exist amongst us. At least have the
courtesy to pass this on and on till the whole world comes to know about
this Great Good Samaritan.
 
Hat's off Kalayanasundaram.. We Indians are extremely proud of you and
proudly say "THIS HAPPENS ONLY IN INDIA".

Aug 12 2014 : The Times of India (Ahmedabad)

Awaas Yojana to shed Indira's name

Subodh.Ghildiyal @timesgroup.com

New Delhi:





Indira Gandhi's name is set to be removed from the popular rural housing programme that provides subsidies to the poor to have a house of their own, in a move which will symbolize the regime change.The rural development ministry is looking to turn Indira Awaas Yojana, a scheme, into a “mission“ with increased budget and with an important design innovation which mandates toilets to be part of the housing units constructed under the scheme.
If the `mission mode' is approved, Indira Awaas Yojana would be called `National Gramin Awaas Mission'.
The first step towards erasing Congress's imprint on the scheme has come in the rural development ministry's “discussion paper“ that has the prospective title in place of IAY.
The proposed name ­ National Gramin Awaas Mission ­ is set to cause heartburn in the Congress camp. This is because Indira remains the topmost party icon and her name figures more than any other leader's in government nomenclature, be it a place or scheme. Her son Rajiv and father Jawaharlal Nehru are others after whom schemes and venues are named, a source of standing criticism of Congress.
Though Congress will not like the scrapping of Indira's name, the rural development ministry has amplified its intent by public circulation of the discussion paper with a title shorn of the Congress imprimatur.
For Congress, just humiliated in the Lok Sabha elections, this may be a red rag from PM Narendra Modi who does not miss an opportunity to needle the rival by proclaiming “Congress-mukt Bharat“ as his political objective, asserting that he wants to eliminate the premier party from the political landscape.
Removing the Congress leader's name from the rural housing scheme is set to be seen from the political prism.
More may be in the offing.
The Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission has just expired and the Centre is likely to unfurl its new avatar without the name of the country's first PM.
If Congress has for years ignored the criticism of its method, it is because it views strategic significance in embedding the Nehru-Gandhi family in welfare schemes. With its positioning as a pro-poor party , the party has effectively used the names to etch its authorship of major schemes in the minds of beneficiaries.
The fear of renewed sniping from rivals made Congress prefix the name of Mahatma Gandhi to the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act when it was renamed. But here too, Congress has a claim on the father of the nation ahead of the rivals.