“I’m getting my old age pension regularly. But my worries are different. I’m more worried about my daughter, who is suffering from epilepsy. Further, one of her hands is slightly shorter. She can’t even go to a pond alone to have her bath. Someone has to accompany her. The government is not willing to declare her as physically challenged, as she doesn’t fully meet their criteria of disability. So she’s not eligible for the disability pension. Neither is she married nor is she old enough to apply for old age or widow pension. Due to this ailment, no one is ready to marry her. I don’t know what will happen to her after I die, and I’m already 75”.

Talking about his daughter Rashmita, this was what Shankar told with a lot of pain to Rajkishor, the leader of a team that had gone to his village to help facilitate social audit of the pension schemes. Rajkishor serves as the State Advisor for Odisha to Commissioners of the Supreme Court on Food Rights. The Office of the State Advisors carries the mandate of tracking the implementation of interim orders relevant to the Right to Food Case across the country and demanding redress; monitoring and reporting the implementation status of the said orders to the Supreme Court, and holding dialogues with respective government authorities on their efforts in making the orders functional.

As part of this mandate, Rajkishor’s office was helping facilitate social audits of the various social security pensions, namely the national Indira Gandhi Pension and the state sponsored madhu Babu Pension for the aged, widows and people living with disability. The piloting was being done in 35 GPs across 18 blocks of 10 districts. The team was visiting 401 revenue villages and more than 200 hamlets with an aim to closely understand how the programme was faring in the state, identify issues related to beneficiary exclusion and inclusion errors, create a trained pool of volunteers across the state and come up with a set of guidelines for social audit which could be taken up by the state government. It took more than 100 days to complete the process. The team directly interacted with 11836 pension beneficiaries and collected information about 4892 from their family members and other sources.

Shankar’s question kept haunting Rajkishor all through the night. Next morning, he phoned all his team members and asked them to identify such vulnerable women from all the villages they were visiting and document their cases with as many details of their vulnerability. This became a mission for the entire team, during the leg of their field visit. During the verification the team found 81 such vulnerable single women who were clearly in dire need of social support. Some were unmarried and did not have any male member in their family to support them. Some had chronic illnesses, while some were divorced and without support.

The team closely interacted with all the 81 women and documented their cases meticulously with all details. Care was taken to collect their photos, identity proofs like Voter ID cards and other documents. All the 81 women were advised to approach the Gram Panchayat office and apply for the Madhu Babu pension. A dossier containing the documents of the 81 women was prepared and shared with the Secretary-cum-Commissioner, Women and Chid Development Department, Government of Odisha, while sharing the overall recommendations emerging from the pilot social audit and the beneficiary verification process. Rajkshor and his team gave a comprehensive presentation on the plight of such women to a houseful of senior officials of the department in the presence of the Secretary in the month of October 2013.

The presentation was followed by series of visits to the department for lobbying with the Secretary to include such single and vulnerable women into the fold of pension scheme. Finally, the lobbying efforts yielded result. Not only did the Secretary accept most of the recommendations of the Advisor office in relation to the pension schemes, she also amended the Madhu Babu Pension Yojana Rules 2008 and declared unmarried and vulnerable single women as another category of vulnerable sections eligible to get Social Security Pension from the government in November 2013.

Acting on other suggestions from the OSA-CSC, the department also revised the Guidelines of the Pension Schemes. Most recommendations made by the Advisor’s office such as i) preparation of village wise list of eligible beneficiaries on the basis of two criteria – age and vulnerability; ii) introduction of scope to verify age from the voter ID card / electoral roll of the Gram-Panchayat / NAC / Municipality; iii) introduction of uniform entitlement cards (photo identity cards for pensions); and iv) provision of Social Audit of the scheme at the block level twice a year were included in the revised guidelines.

In another similar initiative, the advisor’s office while having a village level meeting with some of the Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTGs), realised that many PVTG mothers were being deprived of the state maternity benefits from MAMATA. In Odisha, the State Government has launched a state specific scheme for pregnant women and lactating mothers called MAMATA- a conditional cash transfer maternity benefit scheme. This scheme provides monetary support to the pregnant and lactating women to enable them to seek improved nutrition and promote health seeking behaviour. However, the scheme has a two-child rider that the benefit would be extended to mothers only for the first two births and not for the third. The PVTGs are victims of high level of inequalities in social and economic conditions. The growth of PVTGs’ population is either stagnating or declining, compared to the general population growth, which is the reason why PVTG mothers want to go for more than two children. But the two child norm was a barrier to their getting the benefits from MAMATA. The Office of the State Advisor brought this to the notice of the Women and Child Development Department. Continuous interactions by the OSA-CSC with the Women and Child Development Department resulted in the relaxation of the two-child norm under MAMATA for the PVTG mothers.

Going by an estimation, the amendment in the Pension scheme is likely to benefit more than 50000 single and vulnerable women with a monthly pension of Rs 300 which though small in amount will provide a big succour to them. Similarly, the waiver of the two-child norm would help around 10000 PVTG mothers to improve their nutrition and health status during the times of pregnancy and lactation.

This is a small indication of how small but evidence based lobbying initiatives, when taken up patiently and strategically with the apex level policy makers, can result in tangible benefits to the most marginalized and excluded sections of society, especially women.

The Odisha Office of the State Advisor to Commissioners of the Supreme Court (OSA-CSC) has been a strategic development partner of DanChurchAid (DCA) since 2008 for strengthening the food rights of the tribal and other marginalized segments of society in Odisha. Currently, the OSA-CSC provides technical support to a project titled “Fighting Poverty by Improving People’s Access to and Participation in Governance of Public Schemes and Services in Koraput and Sundargarh of Odisha” co-supported by the European Union and DancChurchAid.