Mumbai: In January 2018, as soon as Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated his dream project ‘Aspirational District Programme‘, Sona Devi* was among the first few from Ghumla, a tribal district in Jharkhand, to join the workforce.Sona, 23, unemployed and a first-generation literate woman, was offered Rs 4,500 and appointed as a ‘Sathi’ under the programme. She had to travel from village to village and conduct long, arduous surveys. The job opportunity looked lucrative and Sona was confident that the programme would contribute towards changing the face of the district.Two years later, however, with a disproportionately heavy workload and erratic salary disbursement, Sona says the project has only exploited marginalised tribal youths of the country further.According to her, she and 13 others working in Ghumla district have not been paid since February. Meanwhile, the workload has continued to increase.Until the first week of March, Sona and the other Sathis would walk about 20-25 kilometres every day and conduct long-drawn surveys in the interiors of the district. With over 360 questions touching on several social development indices, Sona says, at best, seven-eight persons could be interviewed in a day. In 2018, while the project was meant to pay Rs 4,750 per month, the salary was abruptly reduced to Rs 3,500.After the Central government announced a nationwide lockdown, the nature of the work changed. “We were not expected to travel any more. Surveys had to be completed over phone calls now. The government asked us to assess if the poor in the villages were following social distancing. There were multiple questions on implementation of other welfare schemes too. Each call would last for 30-40 minutes,” she says.Sona’s counterparts in Chhattisgarh have it worse.Durgesh*, 28, who works as a block coordinator in one of the tribal districts, says that he has not been not paid since November 2019. The state coordinator, he says, asked them to continue with their work and said that the money would be paid soon.Also read: Supporting Aspirational Districts to Help India Meet Its SDGs“But how do we carry on like this without any money? In most cases, people working on the project are the sole earners in their families. We continued with the project hoping that the condition would improve sooner than later. But close to seven months have passed,” he says.Durgesh says that each time he inquires about the delay, his seniors tell him that they are contributing to a larger cause and that the workers would be paid eventually. “I wanted to give up a long time ago. But I’m also afraid that they won’t pay my dues,” he says.On January 5, 2018, PM Modi had inaugurated the ‘Aspirational District Programme’ project amid much fanfare. The project was to create ‘aspirational districts’ out of those lacking key social indicators and factors that directly impact the human development index.NITI Aayog, in collaboration with development partners like Tata Trusts, ID Insight and Piramal Foundation, identified indicators like health, nutrition, education, agriculture, water resources, financial inclusion, skill development and basic infrastructure to identify and assess progress in as many as 115 districts in 28 states. Each year, rankings are released on the basis of the performances of these districts and an assessment is conducted by the development partners.The development partners further collaborated with grassroots NGOs and worked out an implementation plan. For instance, Tata Trusts, which has been working with the NITI Aayog since 2018 as its ‘knowledge partner’ to implement the scheme, has several smaller grassroots organisations working for it across 85 districts in 27 states.Also read: Why India’s Lockdown Has Been a Spectacular FailureTata Trusts says the primary responsibility of the organisations is to conduct periodic digitised surveys, at institutional and household levels, on the implementation of various government schemes. Tata Trusts has appointed partners to assist with the survey. These partners, in turn, appoint local level NGOs for the field work. But in most states, since Tata Trusts has failed to disburse the funds to the NGOs on time, those on the ground don’t get paid.Bharat Gyan Vigyna Samiti (BGVS), the organisation that is responsible of carrying out a third-party assessment of government schemes in nine states, has not been paid for close to six months. In each of these nine states, BGVS has around 30-35 persons working on the project. Among them, barring the state coordinator’s post, all other positions are filled by those belonging to the Scheduled Tribe, Scheduled Castes and Other Backward Classes.Similarly, there are several other organisations like Mahila Arthik Vikas Mahamandal (MAVIM), Ekjut, Partnering Hope into Action (PHIA)-Jharkhand that have been working in different states across the country. The programme, by design, is to transform districts that lag on key human development index indicators and hence almost all 115 districts are in the tribal region or those with marginalised persons from the SC and OBC communities.Under the project, while the district coordinator is entitled to Rs 23,250 as a monthly salary, the block coordinator gets Rs 14,500 every month. But most coordinators that The Wire spoke to complained of inconsistencies in the payment and claimed that the organisations have failed to provide any explanation.Many field workers say they have not received any official communication for the delay in payment either. The Wire had first spoken to Durgesh*, a block coordinator in Chhattisgarh last week. Following this, a questionnaire was sent out to Tata Trusts.While Tata Trusts has agreed to have not paid most of its ground staff for months, Durgesh says a message was sent on the WhatsApp group to say that the payment would soon be made. And on June 24, two months’ salary finally landed in his account.“How do they expect us to accept this behaviour? Five months’ (salary) is still pending and there is not a word on when will the money be disbursed,” he says.Forty-year-old Rupendra Kumar from Hindaun in Rajasthan’s Karauli district discontinued working for the programme in December last year after BGVS did not pay his salary for two months. “I have been a social worker all my life. Karauli is a backward district and I had hoped that my work would contribute towards making the district better. But when the government can’t respect labour rights, how can we expect it to work towards the betterment of the district,” he says.Like Rupendra, women in Maharashtra’s Osmanabad district too had similar experience. They say, they have not been paid during the lockdown. “It was our hard-earned money. And we have been in a dire need of it during the lockdown. But even after multiple reminders, we did not get any response,” a 24- year old woman, who was employed by MAVIM, says.Also read: The Lockdown Backfired and Modi Has Only Himself to BlameIn some cases, ground-level NGOs have dipped into their own pockets and tried to compensate field workers.Rina Sahare, who works with MAVIM in Gadchiroli, a tribal district in Maharashtra, says she has been working on the project from the start. “The organisation has been kind enough to pay me my dues. But it has been a struggle for many others. The organisation too has been struggling to procure funds from the government,” she says.In Chhattisgarh, most block and district level coordinators say they feel exploited on several levels. “When this project was floated two years ago, we were contacted by the NGO (BGVS in this case) and asked to ready 20-30 tribal youth in Central India. These NGO people are all outsiders. We hoped this project will do some good to our community and we convinced people to join the project. Now, we have no face left to show,” says one of the district coordinators.When The Wire contacted BGVS’s Chhattisgarh state coordinator Akhyansh Mishra to find out the cause for delay, he said that the organisation has not received any funds from Tata Trusts. “I have not been paid for the past three months myself. Most of us have continued to work without money,” he added.Debasis Ray, head of communication and public relations, Tata Trusts, said, “We release grants to the partners, who in turn disburse payments to on-ground organisations appointed by them. The grants are made in tranches, basis proof of utilisation from the partners (utilisation certificates) and verification by us of previous grants. In the recent past, there has been some delay in the process of receiving utilisation certificates and their verification. The delay has got exacerbated by the situation emerging out of COVID-19. We are conscious of the issue and are taking steps to streamline payments.”(Some names have been changed to protect their identities.)
