logo
Tribal ministry official reviews welfare schemes in Paderu

Tribal ministry official reviews welfare schemes in Paderu

The Hindu29-06-2025
Section Officer, Union Ministry of Tribal Affairs, Aditya Ghosain, visited various places in Paderu mandal of Alluri Sitharama Raju district to review the implementation of Central Government welfare schemes aimed at the development of Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTGs), on Sunday.
Mr Aditya Ghosain inspected coffee plantations in Modapalli, and interacted with local tribal farmers and asked them about the income generated through cultivating coffee and pepper. The farmers informed him that they earn around ₹1 lakh per acre annually from these crops. He also visited a multi-purpose community building constructed at a cost of ₹60 lakh in Munthamamidi village, in Vanugupalli Panchayat and enquired with the officials on how the building was being used by the people.
Later, he toured some PVTG villages near Sappiputtu and Modapalli panchayats and reviewed the housing units being built under the Pradhan Mantri JANMAN Scheme. He expressed satisfaction with the construction quality and advised beneficiaries to complete their homes as per the sanctioned specifications and move in at the earliest. He also checked the bills submitted by beneficiaries who had completed their houses. The officer also inspected the Anganwadi centres in the villages. He directed the authorities to intensify awareness programmes about the PM JANMAN schemes and other programmes. He later enquired about the issue of Aadhaar cards, bank accounts, Ayushman Bharat health cards and sanction of PM JANMAN housing units.
ITDA Assistant Project Officer M. Venkateswara Rao, Tribal Welfare Department AE Durgaprasad and others were present.
Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Affordable housing needs collaboration between Centre and State, say panellists
Affordable housing needs collaboration between Centre and State, say panellists

The Hindu

time2 hours ago

  • The Hindu

Affordable housing needs collaboration between Centre and State, say panellists

The State and Central governments must collaborate and work together for providing affordable housing, and address issues of equity and financial inclusion. This was one of the major insights shared at the discussion on 'Affordable Housing: Bridging the Urban Housing Gap' organised as part of The Hindu Tamil Nadu Real Estate Summit 2025 in the city on Tuesday. The topics deliberated include the need for inclusive housing, challenges faced by private developers, and the role of the government in providing affordable housing. Noting that housing for marginalised communities cannot be ensured with a one-size-fits-all approach, cannot be done in a one-size-fits-all approach, Vanessa Peter, founder, Information and Resource Centre for the Deprived Urban Communities, said basic requirements should be met without compromising on traditional livelihood spaces. Underlining the challenges in ensuring affordable housing for socially disadvantaged people, she said communities must be consulted before designing houses, and a robust third-party quality monitoring mechanism put in place to reduce design flaws. Speakers also stressed the affordability of housing for urban poor population under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY) by waiver of beneficiary contribution to some extent. When asked whether incremental housing would be developed in satellite townships, A. Srivathsan, professor, Head of the Centre for Research on Architecture and Urbanism at CEPT University, said Arumbakkam Sites and Services Scheme was one of the best examples for incremental housing. The area has turned beyond recognition over a generation as people have become economically strong. However, such housing is only possible with design and legal modifications, given land cost limitations. Pointing out that housing for economically weaker sections is largely covered by the State, he said that land availability and construction cost were some of the challenges. Private players are more interested in promoting housing for higher income groups. Though developing a grid of roads would be ideal for structured housing development, people are often willing to suffer lack of infrastructure and focus on the land cost. Highlighting that inclusive housing was a critical component of equitable growth, R.V. Shekar, chairman and managing director (MD), Lancor Group, spoke on the need for creating an environment to collaborate with the Central government to develop integrated satellite townships at subsidised cost. A pilot project, with up to two lakh houses, could be planned near Chennai. P. Suresh, MD, Arun Excello Group, spoke on integrated township in Oragadam that aims at improving lifestyle. However, obtaining land parcel for developing such townships was a challenge. The government played a pivotal role in allotting land parcels to develop housing for communities. The Central government should consider restoring the benefits offered under the earlier version of the PMAY, and reduce taxes to resolve issues of affordable housing to low and middle income groups. ing. R. Sujatha, former Deputy Editor, The Hindu, moderated the session. The event is presented by Casagrand and co-presented by G Square. The Green Energy partner for the event is Swelect and the Sports Ecosystem partners are SDAT and Tamil Nadu Champions Foundation. The event is supported by CREDAI Tamil Nadu, Lancor, Namma Family Group. The Strategic partner is MMA (Madras Management Association) and the TV and digital partners are Puthiya Thalaimurai, the Federal voice of the States respectively.

Fake Residential Certificate Application In Trump's Name Surfaces In Bihar
Fake Residential Certificate Application In Trump's Name Surfaces In Bihar

NDTV

time3 hours ago

  • NDTV

Fake Residential Certificate Application In Trump's Name Surfaces In Bihar

Patna: In a bizarre twist to the growing trend of fake residence certificate cases in Bihar, an application has surfaced in Samastipur district seeking a certificate in the name of US President Donald Trump. The incident took place in the Mohiuddinnagar zone, where an unidentified person submitted an online application using Trump's photo and name, falsely listing the address as Village Hasanpur, Ward No. 13, Post Bakarpur, Police Station Mohiuddinnagar, District Samastipur. The application, submitted on July 29, 2025, was recorded under Application No. BRCCO/2025/17989735. Upon verification, officials found clear tampering in the form's photo, Aadhaar number, barcode, and address details, prompting the Circle Officer (CO) to reject the application outright. Officials believe the act was deliberately carried out to ridicule and defame the administrative system. Mohiuddinnagar CO confirmed that this is a serious violation under the IT Act, and a complaint has been filed with the local cyber police station. "Strict legal action will be taken against those responsible," said the CO, adding that cybercrime investigators are now tracking the IP address and login credentials used in the prank. This incident is the latest in a series of fake residence certificate scams surfacing across Bihar in recent weeks. Officials have flagged previous applications under names like 'Dog Babu', 'Nitish Kumari', and even in the name of Sonalika tractor, in Patna, East Champaran, Nalanda and other districts of Bihar, exposing glaring loopholes in the online application verification system. The repeated misuse of the online portal has raised serious concerns over digital document integrity and identity fraud. Administrative officers are now considering technical audits and stricter KYC verification mechanisms to prevent further embarrassment. As the state heads into election season, such incidents not only undermine the government's digital governance claims but also highlight the urgent need for cyber vigilance and stronger administrative filters. (Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

The technocratic calculus of India's welfare state
The technocratic calculus of India's welfare state

The Hindu

time3 hours ago

  • The Hindu

The technocratic calculus of India's welfare state

With a billion Aadhaar enrollments, 1,206 schemes integrated into the Direct Benefit Transfer system, and 36 grievance portals across States/Union Territories, India's welfare orientation is transitioning into a technocratic calculus. The promise to deliver social welfare at scale, bypassing leaky pipelines and eliminating ghost beneficiaries, might have led to a 're-casting' that delivers 'efficiency' and 'coverage' at the cost of 'democratic norms' and 'political accountability'. An offloading Are we witnessing the emergence of a post-rights based welfare regime? Is the Indian digital welfare state headed towards a systemic impasse? What is the technocratic calculus behind all this? Recent game-theoretic work shows that technocratic rule thrives where parties are polarised. Evidently, our questions have changed. We have shifted from 'who deserves support and why?' to 'how do we minimise leakage and maximise coverage?' Our politicians across party lines have rationally offloaded hard-choices onto data-driven algorithms without questioning the complexities of constitutional values. Contextualising Habermas's 'technocratic consciousness' and Foucault's 'governmentality', India's welfare architecture is increasingly shaped by measurable, auditable, and depoliticised rationality. Schemes such as E-SHRAM and PM KISAN embody a uni-directional, innovation-led logic that is streamlined, measurable, and intolerant of ambiguity or error. Conversely, we have deliberative calls for participatory planning and local feedback embodying the long forgotten core of democratic thinking resonating Giorgio Agamben's notion of homo sacer — a life stripped of political agency. Seemingly, welfare, in the contemporary context, has ceased to exist as a site of democratic deliberations. On a microscopic level, a rights-bearing citizen has been replaced by the auditable beneficiary. Thus, it calls for an urgent need for the state to revisit (in a Rancierean sense) whether it is curating who is visible, who can complain, and whose suffering is computable. Despite claims of a 'socialistic state', we observe a decade-low decline in India's social sector spending that has dwindled to 17% in 2024-25 from the 2014-24 average of 21%. Further, there are some interesting observations beyond plain statistics. Key social sector schemes have borne the brunt of such decline where minorities, labour, employment, nutrition and social security welfare saw a significant decline from 11% (in the pre-COVID-19 phase) to 3% (in post-COVID-19 phase). Parallely, social commentators often comment the Right to Information (RTI) regime to be in 'existential crisis' and further uncovering the cloak on RTI exposes a critical issue within the institution of dysfunctional information commissions. As of June 30, 2024, the number of pending cases crossed the four lakh tally across 29 Information Commission's (ICs), and eight CIC posts were vacant (annual report of CIC, 2023-24). The Indian welfare regime must recover its capacity for reflexivity and situated knowledge, elements that are very peculiar to gram sabhas and frontline bureaucratic discretions. To draw Rancière's critique on democracy, we highlight one major impending concern, that 'democracy depends on whose suffering is rendered visible and contestable, not merely computable'. This concern is further highlighted in Justice D.Y Chandrachud's Aadhaar dissent (2018), that warned precisely against such decontextualisation of identity which served as a caution against reducing citizens to disembedded, machinic data who are devoid of care, context, or even constitutional assurance in some cases. Another instance of algorithmic insulation Another worrisome trend is the Centralised Public Grievance Redress and Monitoring System's flattening of the federal hierarchies into ticket-tracking systems. Although it is a novel initiative resolving tickets and routing complaints across state agencies, empirical data show that lakhs of grievances were disposed of between 2022-24. But on a closer examination it might just be centralising the visibility but not the responsibility — a form of algorithmic insulation that renders political accountability increasingly elusive. These observations are not to dismiss the value of such initiatives. Rather, they invite a deeper conversation on how welfare governance can evolve for a more resilient and responsive state. The government should now think along the lines of 'democratic antifragility' so that our systems built on perfect data and flawless infrastructure do not fail catastrophically under stress (consider Taleb's 'hyper-integrated systems'). We need to empower States to design context-sensitive regimes where federalism and welfare push for pluralism as a feature. Institutionalising community-driven impact audits (as reiterated by the UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty), by looping in the Rashtriya Gram Swaraj Abhiyan and Gram Panchayat Development Plans should be the core target. All States must be made capable to build platform cooperatives where self-help groups act as intermediaries; functionally, lessons can be learnt from Kerala's Kudumbashree. Civil society must be incentivised to invest in grass-roots political education and legal aid clinics in order to strengthen the community accountability mechanisms. Lastly, it is time we strengthen and codify our offline fall-back mechanisms, human feedback safeguards, and statutory bias audits by embedding the 'right to explanation and appeal' — as proposed by the UN Human Rights for digital governance systems. Focus on the citizen We, as citizens of India, must realise that a welfare state stripped of democratic deliberations is a machine that works efficiently for everyone except those it is meant to help. For a Viksit Bharat we will have to reorient digitisation with democratic and anti-fragile principles so that citizens become partners in governance, and not mere entries in a ledger. Anmol Rattan Singh is the Co-founder of the PANJ Foundation, a Punjab-based policy research think tank. Agastya Shukla is a Programme Associate at the PANJ Foundation, a Punjab-based policy research think tank

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store