New Delhi: The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs is looking to cover more of the urban poor by targeting occupational groups — such as domestic staff, rickshaw drivers, waste pickers, gardeners and construction workers — in the next phase of the Deendayal Antyodaya Yojana-National Urban Livelihood Mission (DAY-NULM), ThePrint has learnt.
The DAY-NULM was launched in September 2013 to reduce the poverty and vulnerability of urban poor households on a sustainable basis. Its primary focus is on creating self-help groups (SHGs), providing skill development, self-employment training, and developing shelters for the homeless. As it currently stands, the mission will end in March 2024.
According to a senior ministry official, the proposal for a second phase of the NULM was approved by the Expenditure Finance Committee under the finance ministry last year. In March this year, the housing and urban affairs ministry held stakeholder consultations with urban poverty experts and non-profit organisations to explore possible options to reach out to a larger section of urban poor, the official said.
“We are working on the contours of the second phase of the mission, though no decision has been taken as yet,” said the official.
Senior ministry officials said the government is planning to push for a shift in focus from skilling to entrepreneurship development, market and bank linkages, uniformity in the norms for identification of the urban poor and social benefit cover for all NULM beneficiaries, apart from targeting occupations in the unorganised sector.
This comes after a push to help street vendors. The PM Street Vendor’s AtmaNirbhar Nidhi (PM SVANidhi) scheme was launched in 2020 to help street vendors with loans to restart their work after the Covid pandemic. With over 55 lakh vendors benefiting from it, according to the ministry’s dashboard for the scheme, urban poverty experts said more such occupation-specific schemes are needed.
Ministry officials flagged the need to “reimagine the urban livelihood mission” to widen its ambit, and also to overcome the challenges faced by states and Union Territories in its implementation.
Gurpreet Kaur, founder and executive director of Action in Community and Training, a non-profit organisation working involved in skill development, who has worked with SHGs under the NULM in Delhi, said, “There is a need for focussed intervention in training people in entrepreneurship development. But forming homogenous SHGs in urban areas, especially in metro cities, is difficult. The NULM is a good initiative, but it has not been able to reach the target population at the rate it should have due to various challenges in urban areas.”
ThePrint reached the housing and urban affairs ministry via text message for a comment. This report will be updated if and when a response is received.
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Need to reimagine livelihood mission
Under the ongoing DAY-NULM, close to 8.7 lakh SHGs, mainly of women, have been formed according to ministry officials, but urban poverty experts said that there is a need to look beyond women’s SHGs and target people working in different sectors.
Officials involved in the implementation of DAY-NULM in different states said that creating SHGs in urban areas is challenging compared to rural areas, as people are mostly migrant workers from different parts of the country. They said a multi-pronged approach is needed to address the concerns of the urban poor.
Urban poverty expert Aravind Unni, who attended the stakeholder consultation in March, said, “The present mission is more about protection and recognition of the urban poor and getting people together to form SHGs. But in cities, we actively need to focus on income generation schemes to ensure people are gainfully employed. It is essential as the income of the urban poor has drastically fallen post-Covid. While SHGs is a good approach, the government should look at targeting focussed groups or sectors or occupations that will be helpful in reaching out to a larger population.”
The government had rolled out an initiative targeting specific occupational groups this September — the Rs 13,000 crore PM Vishwakarma scheme for artisans and craftspeople in rural and urban areas across the country.
Challenges in NULM implementation
According to the mission guidelines, urban poor households are mobilised into a three-tiered structure with SHGs at the grass-root level, Area Level Federations (ALFs) at the slum/ward level and City-Level Federations (CLFs).
The SHGs are groups of 10 to 20 women or men who come together to improve their living conditions by group savings and loans. These groups conduct regular meetings where the savings of the group are collected into a corpus fund, which is used to provide short-term loans to the members. “After About WordPresssome time, when the credit requirements of the members increase, the SHGs may approach a bank for a loan,” say the guidelines.
Even as 89.33 lakh women in urban areas have been brought under SHGs, officials in states said forming such groups there is a challenge as most of the urban poor are migrant workers. “They take time to develop a bond. In many cases, holding regular SHG meetings is difficult as people often move to other parts of the city or go back to their home state for a long duration, especially during festival season,” said an official involved in the implementation of the DAY-NULM in Maharashtra.
The idea of SHGs is to push people towards self-employment, but it takes time to do so in urban areas. “In urban areas, most migrants live in rented accommodation. For them, the initial focus is on paying rent instead of starting a business as part of the SHG,” said an Uttar Pradesh government official involved with the mission.
The ministry is now planning to focus on entrepreneurship development in the next phase, going beyond skill training, which has been one of the main focus areas of the ongoing mission.
“Though entrepreneurship development is a component of the ongoing mission, skilling is the main focus. The idea is to not just give them skill training but also to empower them with the knowledge about running a business, provide necessary assistance to start their own business, help them in strategy development, marketing of projects or services etc.,” said a senior ministry official.
(Edited by Smriti Sinha)
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