At a Press conference here on Wednesday, representatives of Prayas, a single window setup launched in Bhubaneswar by the Centre for Advocacy and Research (CFAR) since September 2016, shared about the success achieved in strengthening the access of unorganised and marginal women and households to significant schemes and programmes.
A resident of Harijan Sahi and a community leader with Prayas, Ranjita Nayak, emphasised that the entire initiative helped them in more ways than one. “We are not only getting the schemes, but also understand how the department and officials implementing the schemes function and ensure that they respond to the applications we submit, address our concerns and that too in a time bound manner,” she said.
Sharing about the success of the initiative, CFAR’s Sameer Das said that by the end of December 2016, a total 1,506 community members were enrolled for Aadhaar. A total of 189 persons had applied for ration cards while 109 had secured it.
Similarly, 63 of the 115 workers who applied for labour card had secured it. 15 applied for old age pension and seven have got it. Thirteen applied for widow pension and six got it. Eight applied for and got the AAY while 130 applied for subsidy to construct individual household toilets and 98 of them have secured it so far, said Das.
The idea is not just to enhance inclusion of the marginalised and disadvantaged, but to work towards making urban poor governance mechanisms more sensitive and wary of community concerns, make them more responsive towards community and participatory process through structures such as the Prayas and finally strengthen accountability at all levels so that every plan, policy or programme gets implemented in both letter and spirit,” said CFAR State project manager Pujafula Pattanayak.