Social security for single women in Ganjam

BHUBANESWAR: In a pioneering step to support single women, who are not covered under social security and land entitlement schemes, the Ganjam district administration has launched Women Support Centre (WSC) programme.These centres will allow widows, separated, disabled and abandoned women access social security benefits.Launching the scheme on Friday, Ganjam Collector Krishan Kumar told this paper that women’s access to Revenue administration is limited. This leaves single women at a huge disadvantage. The centres will be led by women revenue inspectors and the process of identifying women, who need State support under this scheme, will be carried out by anganwadi workers.On the need for specifically targeting single women and women-headed households, Kumar said the welfare benefits of the Government are not reaching these women, who need it the most, due to lack of official data.   The programme will be rolled out by Rural Development Institute and ActionAid. The two civil society organisations will provide support to build capacities of Revenue officials, anganwadi workers, Panchayati Raj Institution functionaries and other stakeholders in creating systems for identification of beneficiaries and monitoring, he said.The Women Support Centres will act as a single-window delivery system to allocate land to women under different schemes of the Government, create awareness among women about their legal rights to land and resolve land-related disputes through an effective grievance redressal mechanism.The centres exclusively aim at identifying and supporting poor single women above the age of 30, women with disabilities and women-headed households having income less than Rs 24,000 per annum with no or less than one standard acre of agricultural land and no homestead land."The focus will be on ensuring women their land rights and all other entitlements like housing assistance, pension, identity papers and food schemes. A responsive institutional delivery system to identify and facilitate the rights of single women will be created,’’ Kumar said.The scheme will be fully rolled out by  year-end and is expected to pave the way for realisation of 10,000 landless women getting secured titles.