Latest news with #UnionSocialJusticeMinistry
The Hindu
07-07-2025
- Politics
- The Hindu
Social Justice Ministry seeks additional allocation for overseas scholarship
The Union Social Justice Ministry is in the process of seeking additional allocation for administering the National Overseas Scholarship scheme for marginalised students, officials told The Hindu, days after the ministry withheld provisional award letters to 66 selected candidates 'subject to availability of funds' in the 2025-26 cycle. On July 1, the Ministry declared the results for the 2025-26 cycle of the NOS, saying that 106 students had been selected for the 125 annual slots available. But it added that only the first 40 candidates will be given provisional award letters, and the rest will get the letter 'subject to availability of funds'. The Ministry administers this scholarship for students from Scheduled Caste, Denotified, Semi-Nomadic, and Nomadic Tribes, landless agricultural labourers and traditional artisans, backgrounds, for pursuing postgraduate studies in top universities abroad. This is the first time in at least three years that the 1st round of results for the NOS has seen the selection committee unable to fill all 125 available slots. Further, the applications received for the scholarship also dropped to a low of around three years to about 440. This comes even though the Budget Estimates for 2025-26 showed the scheme receive the highest allocation it has in around five years of ₹130 crore. A senior government official said, 'We are seeking more allocation to administer the scheme. The allocation this year is higher than others. But what must be considered is that the scholarship is paid out through the period of education of the candidates. So, a part of this year's allocation must be used for this as well, that is for candidates selected in previous years and continuing their studies. As a result, the ministry is seeking more allocation and soon this will be worked out.' Notably, the fund-crunch for the National Overseas Scholarship administered by the Social Justice Ministry comes even as the government is in the middle of evaluating the scheme in time for the 16th financial cycle, which will be beginning from Financial Year 2026-27. 'All the issues in administering the scholarship are being considered. The evaluation is currently underway,' the official said. The evaluation is part of the government's procedure to check how the scheme is performing and decide if it should be continued. Earlier this year, the Departmentally-related Parliamentary Standing Committee on Social Justice and Empowerment, had pointed out several issues with the gamut of scholarship schemes administered by the ministry. Among them, the panel had noted that the amounts of scholarships were not enough, the slots for schemes like NOS needed to be increased, and the issue of scholarship disbursals spilling onto the next year, year after year.
The Hindu
26-04-2025
- The Hindu
Two years in, SMILE scheme identifies fewer that 10,000 people engaged in begging; 970 rehabilitated
Two years after the Union Social Justice Ministry started identifying, surveying, and profiling people engaged in begging under the SMILE scheme, the programme has so far identified 9,958 such individuals across 81 major cities and towns where it is being implemented. In comparison, the 2011 Census had recorded 3.72 lakh beggars across the country. As per records available with the Ministry, which runs the Support for Marginalised Individuals for Livelihood and Enterprise (SMILE) scheme, of the 9,958 persons identified, 970 have been rehabilitated. Of those rehabilitated, 352 were children as of December 2024. The SMILE scheme was launched in 2022. One of its components was the sub-scheme to identify, profile, and rehabilitate individuals engaged in the act of begging with their consent. The other component of the scheme is for the empowerment of transgender persons. According to the guidelines for the sub-scheme to rid India of 'beggary', the idea was to 'make identified urban spaces, mainly religious cities, tourist places, and historical cities free from beggary'. The scheme was started across 30 cities in Phase 1, which included cities like Ayodhya, Dharamsala, Amritsar, Gir Somnath, Giridih, New Delhi, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Nagpur, Gaya, Lucknow, Madurai, Kochi, Jammu, Srinagar, and Jaisalmer. In Phase 2, which began in the second year of its implementation, 50 more cities were added to this list. The Socio-Economic and Caste Census of 2011, which the Social Justice Ministry continues to refer to in their 2024 Handbook on Social Welfare Statistics, estimated that over 6.62 lakh households in rural India rely on begging, or charity or alms. According to the scheme guidelines, the target of the scheme was to rehabilitate at least 8,000 people in the three years between FY 2023-24 and FY 2025-26. The strategy for this involved looping in local government agencies down to the level of the urban local bodies and municipal corporations. It would entail identifying and surveying the people engaged in the act, outreach to them, their rehabilitation, and then their comprehensive resettlement. The handbook for conducting the identification, profiling, and surveying exercise, says that local surveyors are expected to identify and survey about 25 individuals engaged in begging. The handbook asks the survey team to first photograph or video the person engaged in the act, and then 'approach the person in a friendly manner' to start collecting more information. The latest guidelines for the sub-scheme said that an allocation of ₹100 crore had been made for it, to be spent over three years – from 2023-24 to 2025-26. According to the Social Justice Ministry's Annual Report for 2024-25, as of December 31, 2024, the government had spent ₹14.71 crore on this scheme.
