NEW DELHI: Almost a year after the government announced the formation of a development and welfare board for denotified, nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes, the organisational status of the board’s members still remains pending.
The welfare board’s mandate is to formulate and implement welfare and development programmes for DNTs and to identify locations/areas where the communities are densely populated.
“The organisational status of the members would give the impetus to the board to start identifying the committees as per the board’s mandate. This would require state visits where the communities are located which would help the members chalk out the future course in policymaking and interventions for the DNTs,” said a member of the board.
The board has also been entrusted with the responsibility of assessing and identifying gaps in accessing existing programmes and entitlements and to collaborate with ministries in implementing agencies that ongoing programmes meet the requirements of DNTs.
The board should monitor and evaluate the progress of schemes run by the Centre and states for DNTs.
The board headed by senior RSS leader Dada Idate currently has five other members and one CEO.
While some of the appointments of members have been recent, others were notified last year.
“Intervention of welfare schemes of communities as marginalised as DNTs requires that there is a strong body of research. A welfare board will benefit from a strong set of researchers as that would bring more nuanced understanding of the current gaps in policymaking for DNTs,” said a ministry of social justice and empowerment official.
“The structure of a board should be well thought out in order for the communities to benefit from the constitution of the board,” the official added.
The Renke Commission, which had submitted its report in 2008, had conducted a rapid survey had said over 50 per cent of DNTs lacked any kind of documents, and 98 per cent were landless.
The Idate Commission which submitted its report in 2018 had observed that they DNTs were impoverished, and unaware of their rights and entitlements.