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Lack of Awareness and lengthy process, 
the reason for not achieving the goals.

Project Director 

On discussion with my grass root officers, I was told that people are not interested to take benefit of the schemes This contention I couldn’t digest that the people of Goa State are not interested to take the benefit of the Govt. schemes. It striked in my mind that there could be only 3 possibilities for this problem:

1. People are rich and feel that the assistance is negligible.
2. People are not aware of the schemes.
3. People are fedup with the administrative steps and the lengthy procedure for obtaining the assistance. 

As per my past experience and contact with the people as Block Development Officer & Jt. Mamlatdar my conscience did not permit me to accept the first reason that the people are rich and did not require any assistance to improve their living conditions as I have observed them closely. Hence, I came to the conclusion that it could be the last 2 reasons for not achieving our goals. Thereafter, consultation with my office colleagues, I decided to contact the BPL families and find out the real reasons. 

To start with this new movement, I preferred to begin with the blessings of “Godess Lairai”. December 16, 2001 being the historical date in the working of DRDA North, when the first Village Awareness Camp organized at Shirigao-Bicholim turned out to be successful. 

All the 35 BPL families of Shirigao Panchayat were informed individually by sending official letters and requested to remain present in the Panchayat Hall, where the DRDA Officers, BDO and Panchayat authorities were present and after briefing the schemes and individual discussions to find out the possibility in which scheme assistance could be given and by simplifying the procedures, the applications of National Old Age Pension Scheme (NOAPS), National Maternity Benefit Scheme (NMBS) and Balika Samridhi Yojana (BSY)were disposed off on the spot by curtailing all the bureaucratic hurdles and lengthy process. In this camp, we disposed off 13 cases under NOAPS and 3 cases under BSY.

This camp made my mind crystal clear that not only lengthy process was the reason for the assistance not reaching the needy people, but due to lack of awareness. This gave encouragement to my team to have a number of Camps from that date.

In the year 2001, when I took over the charge of the Project Director at DRDA-North, has covered all the 120 Village Panchayats by inviting 16311 BPL families out of which 10,782 BPL families attended the Camps and in these Camps 2146 Old Age Pension cases, under the scheme of Balika Samrudhi Yojana (BSY) there were only 47 applications, but today 1165 girls have been benefited by this scheme. A total of 1211 women have benefited from IAY.
The achievements for the past years are shown in the graphs.

In addition, these camps have given boost to other schemes also.

As per the Planning Commission’s directions, the new BPL Census is under progress. Once the Census is completed, we will reach to newly identified BPL families, bring them above the poverty line with in period of two year, and achieve this State’s goal of Zero percent poverty in rural areas.

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