Thousands who lost one parent left out of Covid relief after tweak
BHOPAL: Till April this year, the lives of the two sisters were the definition of comfortable. One sister, 10, studied in an international school in Indore. The other, 19, was a B Tech student at an engineering college in the city. They shared a dream, to emulate their father’s career as a software engineer. That was until April 29, when their father, the only earning member of the family died of Covid-19. Their mother, 50, slipped into depression, and they now live with their elderly grandfather in a home, for which rent has not been paid for three months. The savings the family has are being used for ration and supplies. But there was one thin glimmer of hope: a government scheme that promised children who lost even one parent to Covid-19 a monthly pension of ₹5,000 till they turned 21, free ration and importantly, free education. Then, that door too shut. On May 13, Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, announced the Mukhyamantri Covid -9 Jan Kalyan Scheme, which promised financial aid to children who lost a parent (or both) to the pandemic. The original draft of the scheme says children in families that lost earning members are eligible for the scheme.
But months later, both sisters from Indore have found themselves outside the ambit of the scheme because of a change in the definition of the beneficiaries in the final version of the scheme. “The draft of the scheme, which was approved by the cabinet, includes only orphans under the Covid-19 Bal Seva Scheme. Point number 4.4 of the form, which made singleparent kids eligible for benefits has been removed,” a senior official from the Woman and Child Department (WCD) said on condition of anonymity.
The reason for the change, officials said, was in the numbers. Orphans that lost both their parents that applied under the scheme totaled 1,001. The number of children that applied who lost one parent? Over ten thousand. “We simply don’t have the budget to cover this,” said the official.
The state has since suggested that these 10,000 children can apply under the decade-old Foster Care and Sponsorship Scheme, under which recipients get a monthly aid of ₹2,000. Yet here too, there is a catch. The scheme, originally introduced to help abandoned children, only allocates ₹10 lakh per year as an additional budget per district. Within that allowance, a district department can only take care of forty children per district, leaving out the vast majority.
The change in the scheme’s contours has left many aggrieved families even more desperate with the mother of a 12-year-old boy from Gwalior telling HT that she “blamed herself” for surviving Covid-19. “My son was studying in a reputed school but I lost my husband to Covid in May. My husband was a manager in a factory, and earned between sixty to seventy thousand rupees a month. I am a housewife and now, I don’t have money to pay the fees for my son. Now, I am cursing myself. Because I am alive, my son has to forego financial aid.”