The wrinkles on Jameela's face have less to do with her age and more with the circumstances of her life.
A widow, she now lives with her daughter and six granddaughters in a small tenement in Jagdamba Camp in South Delhi. With her son-in-law having deserted his wife, there is no male member in the family to support it.
Jameela used to earlier work as a domestic help but broke her hand some years ago in an accident and now relies heavily on the Rs 1,000 widow pension, she sometimes gets, to help her daughter in supporting the family. But the manner of disbursement of the amount has done precious little to ameliorate her troubles.
The disbursal of her widow's pension has been erratic to say the least. “It was in 2007 that I started getting the MCD pension, but in the course of the year I only received it for three months – that too at the Councillor's intervention”. The three credits of Rs 500 each then were like godsend for her. The amounts used to get credited into her Punjab National Bank account in Sheikh Sarai. But then the credits stopped altogether. Incidentally, in the case of about 40 other residents of Jagdamba Camp too the pension stopped with the MCD polls in 2007 as the new Councillor drew his own list of beneficiaries.
An appeal worked
In 2009, an NGO helped register Jameela with the Delhi Government for the Rs 1,000 per month widow pension. However, she did not receive any pension for a full year. It was only after NGO Satark Nagrik Sangathan filed an appeal up to the Central Information Commission on her behalf that Jameela's account was credited Rs 12,000 in 2010. “But this is against the principal of pension which required monthly credits so that the beneficiaries are able to make ends meet,” said Anjali Bharadwaj of SNS.
However, for the years 2010 and 2011, Jameela has thus far got only Rs 3,000. “The payments are not only erratic, there is no one to inform these poor people the reasons why the pensions don't get credited,” rued Anjali.
And that is not all. The underlying fears of various organisations working with the poor and the underprivileged for securing their rights about cash transfers have also proved true because of the manner in which the system is operating.
In the case of 73-year-old Goverdhan of Moti Lal Nehru Camp, who had applied for old age pension in 2009, it was only after filing an RTI that the money began getting credited into his post office account. “A sum of Rs 12,000 for the whole of 2009 came from the date the RTI was filed. But when I went to withdraw it, they said it went back (got debited) the same day through the electronic transfer,” said his daughter Kusum Lata.
Not one to give up, Kusum went to the concerned offices of the Social Welfare Department in Lajpat Nagar, Qutub Hotel and Delhi Gate to pursue the matter. Her perseverance finally paid off when in July 2011 the Department informed her that an amount of Rs 21,000 has now been credited into the account.
``These cases just highlight that if the Government has to succeed with schemes like cash transfers, it would first need to streamline the electronic bank transfer system and make it more transparent and accountable. Otherwise, the poor would never know who got enriched at their expense and which door to knock for their rights,'' said Anjali.
