Government bid to mainstream transgender persons

In a major shift, the government and the civil society have joined together to pave the way for transgender people and sex workers to be mainstreamed by linking them with major government schemes.

Mandated by the National Mission for Empowerment of Women, ministry of women and child development, the Centre for Advocacy and Research (CFAR) and 22 community-based organisations from Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra initiated a pilot project in seven districts to assess and design a social Inclusion Intervention for sex workers in all four states and transgender persons in Tamil Nadu.

In the last two years, the project succeeded in linking sex workers and transgender persons with 33 government schemes. The civil society reached out to 50,055 people, facilitating 30,791 to pursue, of which 25,196 were benefited from the government schemes. The schemes included ration card seeding, Aadhaar cards, Jan Dhan Yojana, Pradhan Mantri Jeevan Jyoti Beema Yojana, among others.

NACO director-general N.S. Kang recognised that the endeavour made by various organisations can go a long way. During a meet Wednesday, Preeti Sudan, additional secretary in the WCD ministry, said that the single window initiative had thrown up many valuable lessons on the process of community-led facilitation to enable their peers to access all social entitlements.

Speaking about the pilot project, Akhila Sivadas, executive director, CFAR, emphasised that “any talk about mainstreaming will only be meaningful if marginal communities are integrated into every programme.”

Focusing on the importance of community participation and involvement, Kousalaya, President of PWN+ said that “only a mechanism like Single Window can embed the community of people living with HIV into the entire process of scheme planning, implementation and final delivery.” This was experienced by the Positive Women’s Network when they set up Single Window at Ajmer and Nagpur in 2014, she added.

Significantly, Shakthivel, Assistant Commissioner of Police, Tamil Nadu stated that when the sex workers approached him he thought that the only help they needed was to stop the undue harassment from the public as well as police officials. However, when he interacted with the CBO members, he realized they were “demanding more and particularly the right to recognized as unorganized workers as many of them were involved in many kinds of informal work and it was well within their right to access the Labour Welfare Card.”