Pardarshita: Annual Report from April 2008-March 2009

Mission:

To fight corruption and ensuring transparency and accountability in the Governance system thereby empowering the marginalized section.
About the Organization:
Pardarshita is a non-profit organization. It was registered in December 2005 founded by activists associated with Parivartan. Pardarshita has been formed with the aim of fighting corruption and ensuring transparency and accountability in the Public Governance systems thereby empowering the marginalized sections. The goal of Pardarshita is to spread awareness about Right to Information (RTI) and empower common people to use the RTI tool to ensure access to his/her rights and entitlements.
 Objectives of the organization:
• to create awareness amongst the common people about their rights.
• to make the government authorities more accountable and transparent.
• to ensure good quality of education for every child by invoking right to education.
• to conduct research on how the fund is being utilized in government run schools.
• to motivate the marginalized section of the society to minimize their dependency and create sustainable systems
• to form community based groups.
Executive Committee:
Rajiv Kumar- President
Ritu Mehra- Secretary/ Treasurer
Shaweta Anand- Executive member
Diwan Singh- Executive member
Momin Khan- Executive member
Ram ashish- Executive member

Main Activities:

Establishing of Resource Centre:
A resource centre has been established at F-185,186, New Seemapuri. The purpose of the centre was to spread awareness and disseminate information and capacity building of local community. The resource centre is equipped with ready information on PDS, Social welfare department schemes, schemes of SC&ST & OBC Department and information with respect to issue of Voter I D Card and enrolment of their names in voter list. The other schemes of Delhi Government like Ladli scheme and insurance schemes for the poorest of the poor.

The broad outcome of the Resource Centre is given below:
1. The forms of different schemes are freely and readily available to the people, now they need not to run from pillar to post for getting the forms
2. The people are being assisted for filing the forms and simultaneously the educated member of the family which is being provided the assistance is also being taught that how to fill the form.
3. The people are being aware about their rights.
4. The people are gradually acknowledging the power of Right to Information Act and now they them selves ask to file the application under the RTI Act if their work gets stricken in the Govt. Department.
5. The people being aware about the different schemes which are being introduced by the Govt. from time to time.  

Beneficiaries: No. of Ration cards released: 250 cards approximately.

No. of people received for old age pension: 25

No. of women received widow pension: 15

No. of voter I-cards released: 200 approximately.

Admission Campaigns:
The activities of Pardarshita started from the admission campaigns in Delhi at various locations like inside the DC office complex, outside Metro stations, in different communities and in the trade fair too.
The basic objective for organizing these camps was to assist parents for the problems which they are facing during the admission of their wards in the schools run by the Government because the principals and the teachers ask for the unnecessary documents for the admission. During this campaign laisioning with the Deputy Director of Education and Director of Primary Education was also done for facilitating the parents. More than 500 complaints against 54 schools were collected from the parents for the denial of admission cases, and these complaints were presented in the High Court during the court proceedings and as a result Hon’ble court issued contempt of court notice to all these public schools.

During this campaign more than 700 students were facilitated for the admission in Public schools under EWS quota and more than 300 students were facilitated for admission in Govt. and MCD schools.                 Beneficiaries: Number of admissions in 54 Public schools: 700+

Number of admissions in Govt. & MCD Schools: 300+

Financial Assistance to students:
The rules which were formed for the admission of children under Economically Weaker Section quota stated that those students will get financial assistance at par with the students of Government school, for expenditure on account of uniform and books. Therefore parents were mobilized and around 90 RTI applications have been filed by the parents in the education department demanding for the same. As a result the students were given a cheque of Rs. 580/- according to the standard in which they were studying.

Beneficiaries: Number of students given financial assistance in Public Schools: 1000+

Capacity Building Initiatives
Capacity building has been the forte of this period of work because various issues had to be clarified at the community level. Hence the team organized several trainings of the women’s groups, youth groups and rag picker groups on RTI, PDS, sanitation etc. the results of the trainings have been very promising which is visible from the fact that many RTIs have been filed after the trainings. The chief trainings organized in the past quarter include:
Training of women group on PDS and Education and Public Development Works helped in forming issue based groups in Seema Puri. A group of women named Mahila Ration Samiti which is working on improvement of ration distribution system has been formed. The other group which is functional in monitoring of the students admitted under economically weaker section quota is also formed; another group which is actively trying to improve the condition of park in their community is also working hard.
Youth Groups
Youth groups have been given strong emphasis as they are the future crusaders of the area. We have organized some special trainings focusing on the needs of the youth in this quarter. Issues like livelihood, PDS, RTI, street theatre activities have been organized by Pardarshita. The youth have benefited greatly from the regular meetings and trainings by Pardarshita.
A two days leadership workshop was also organized for the youth and it was organized in Dehradun. Training on RTI and personality Development was given to them. The strong presence of youth members in our rallies and meetings verifies the close association. The youth group is currently being given training on theatre also and is in process of preparing small street plays on relevant issues such as PDS and education. After his training the youth group offers that they will give regular time to the resource centre, and since then 3-4 youth volunteers are regularly coming to the centre and are learning how to draft application the process of RTI filing and is preceding processes.
Assistance camp for getting Voter I-Card:
It is the right of every citizen of India to vote whosoever has attained the age of 18. The Govt. issues a voter I card within 21 days of filing of form 6 with the SDM (electoral), but it has been noticed that either the people fail to get form 6 from the electoral office or if they happen to get the form in that case their voter card has not been issued by the department.
Therefore an assistance camp with the help of volunteers of Pardarshita was organized in Seema Puri and Bawana. These two camps were organised by the youth group in order to assist the people for filling form-6 and for new BPL ration card.

Outcome: More than 300 form-6 were filed for voter card.

Around 45 RTI applications were filed to know the status of the form which the people have submitted for getting voter cards.

More than 400 voter I-cards were released.

Assistance camp for PDS:
The public distribution system (PDS) ensures the distribution of essential items such as selected cereals, sugar and kerosene at subsidized prices to holders of ration cards. The PDS also helps to modulate open - market prices for commodities that are distributed through the system. The Department of Food & Civil Supplies, Govt. of Delhi, manage the PDS in Delhi by enforcing the Essential Commodities Act, 1955, and various Control Orders made there under.
However, it is also a known fact that the people across the country face different problems in respect to issues of PDS. Pardarshita started identified PDS as one of the potential problems faced by people in slums of Delhi. The major problem which came to notice was that people have applied for the ration cards but they failed to get the cards from the Food & Supply office and beside this the people who want new ration cards and if they go to the circle office the inspector does not issue forms to them.
Therefore camps were organized in order to assist those people.

Outcome: More than 200 forms were filed for new ration cards.

Around 50 RTI applications were filed to know the status of the form which the people have submitted for getting new ration cards.

Around 75 people got their cards which were lying with the department.

Community Watch Group Meetings
Regular Group meeting have been held with women group and with youth group. The meeting with the youth has been organised to discuss the local problems like PDS, Sanitation, roads, communication etc and to identify their roles in the same. Their capacity has been built on the use of RTI, PDS and different Government schemes. The youth group consists of 150 persons in Seema Puri at present. They are also devoting their time for the resource centre too. To engage the youths a computer literacy classes are also being held on a daily basis. 7 computers have been raised through community contribution and are being managed by the youth group in propagating computer literacy.
The women group has more than 60 active women at present. These women are now working on issue based mode like ration mahila samiti is working on ration, EWS monitoring group is working on ensuring the financial assistance in the public schools.