Unconditional & Universal Cash Transfers (UCT) for Poverty Alleviation

Poverty Alleviation
throught Water & Money - because Prana gives Life

For the last 3 years we at dJED Foundation are working to empower marginalised communities primarily by restoring and regenerating natural resources (through watershed development, afforestation, etc.) and supplementing it with education, sport, etc. for capacity building. This is a slow process but has great potential to bring Gram Swaraj in villages.

6 months back, Pankhuri Shah & Muzamil Baig of Project DEEP suggested another way to achieve the same objective of empowering marginalised communities - Unconditional & Universal Cash Transfers (UCT). While I had my apprehensions initially, I soon realised that trust-based giving can indeed be very effective and we partnered for the only existing lump sum cash transfer program in India.

The team (including Shilpa Deulkar, Rupali Jadhav, Mandar Deshpande) did amazing research work on the ground and with a huge struggle managed to collect enough money for phase 1 of our pilot. Last week we announced our plan and today we disbursed INR 65,000 to the oldest working woman in each of the 50 households of Krishnapur village in Wardha district, with no strings attached. While impact will be known only in due course but we know we served without an agenda or expectations, thanks to all the donors. The villagers are extremely happy and grateful that someone is trusting them to improve their own life. We hope that money will reduce their stress (and thus alcohol), lead to better independent decision-making, foster agency, enable self reliance, improve wellbeing, boost local economy and so on. Many global research does corroborate our hypothesis.

This video captures some glimpses.

POVERTY
is not having food
is not having a job
is not having health
is not having peace
is not having money
is not having a voice
is not having a choice
is not having a shelter
is not having education
is not having confidence
is not living to full potential
is not having jameen, jal and jungle
is not having stable income but dependency on weather
is not being able to break out of intergenerational burden
is a complex societal, ecological, spiritual issue
is a multidimensional TRAP

By the way, UCT is scalable and has minimal administration cost, ensuring the most efficient use of money at local level while respecting human dignity. We are creating evidence of implementation and impact which can aid policy making for strengthening existing government programs.

[sunilchavan]

Very good program. There are several studies and international models of UBI, with great results. I recall reading about one such project in MP where everyone in a village was given a fixed sum for a period of 2 years. Initially everyone was very skeptical that they will just blow it away in alcohol or tobacco. At the end of two years, the economy of the village had changed. Let us hope you have similar success in your village too.