The way the formal development administration interfaces with deprived households, often determines outcomes across public services. It is an unequal relationship where the deprived often lack the agency or voice to hold a government system accountable for guaranteed services. Even while interfacing with private providers, the unequal relationship and lack of full public information for entitlements matter.

The women’s collectives under the National Rural Livelihood Mission that is now over a hundred million strong, is a serious effort at creating vibrant community institutions of the deprived households. Through Community Resource Persons (CRPs) like krishi sakhi, pashu sakhi, bank sakhi, banking correspondent sakhi, enterprise promotion sakhi, community mobiliser CRP, and cluster/block level professionals in large numbers, the Mission has been able to create a formidable force of over five lakh women connecting households to services. Together with local government elected leaders in States like Kerala, that have devolved more effectively, these women collectives have strengthened the accountability frameworks and improved access to public services for the marginalised. It is time we realised the urgent need for the last mile facilitation to enable inclusion of the most deprived households. It will never happen by itself. It will have to be made to happen.

Unfortunately, we are very weak on decentralised community action in urban areas. The Ward is too large a unit for community interaction and facilitation. The fragility of lives and livelihoods of migrant communities, the compulsion to keep re-locating where work is available, the absence of identity related documents needed for access to urban services, weak women’s collectives with no basti level formation of community as part of the urban local body structure, makes access to public services that much more difficult in urban areas.

With hard pressed Municipal bodies having responsibility for primary education and primary health services, the migrants in urban locations find it difficult to provide quality education to their children. Documentation is often a nightmare with little or no facilitation. We need CRPs in urban areas as well with a far larger engagement of professionals to secure lives and livelihoods for the urban poor.

The failure of government schools or many health centres is often on account of this missing link of decentralised community action to transform a ‘sarkari’ (government) institution into an ‘asarkari’ (impactful) institution. The lack of this last mile facilitation explains lower off-take in programmes for the deprived like the Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PMJAY), or instances of dual payments at the facility level. It explains why many public institutions can get away with shoddy performance. Routinely constituted School Management Committees or Health Committees, Aanganwadi Committees, without any orientation of members or hand-holding by professionals, is ineffective in soliciting active engagement.

Community actions

The deprived need strong community institutions of the poor to engage with formal government systems. Education, health, skills, nutrition, employment, livelihoods need to come under the oversight of decentralised community action through an organic partnership of elected local government leaders, its funds, functions and functionaries, and women’s collectives with social capital.

The PRI-SHG Framework, already in place, provides for such an integration. The countervailing presence of community organisations improves the accountability of the elected local government leaders and functionaries. Adequate human resources with skill sets needed for good governance of all core and agency functions of local governments is necessary for the effectiveness of last mile facilitation. Adequate untied funds improve the ability of community organisations, institutions and local governments to respond to people’s felt needs. All programmes must provide for last mile facilitation by professionals and CRPs of the Livelihood Mission, capacity development of community representatives, and necessary engagement with PRI-SHG.

Producing documents

Even while seeking basic entitlement as a citizen to universal adult suffrage, ration card, cooking gas connection, a bank account, last mile facilitation is needed to ensure that citizens do have all the documents that are needed. A major success in pro-poor welfare was the 2018 Gram Swaraj Abhiyan where the entire society (Central, State and local Governments, SHGs, public sector undertakings, banks, insurance companies, gram sabhas, frontline workers like ASHAs, Aanganwadi workers, ANMs, school teachers, health workers, MLAs, MPs, etc.) was mobilised to provide seven basic services to the eligible deprived households in 63,974 villages with over 50 per cent population of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.

These services were — cooking gas connection, electricity connection, access to LED bulbs, Jan Dhan bank accounts, life insurance, accident insurance and immunisation for infants and pregnant women. The Abhiyan was a great success due to the whole-of-society approach, built from below. It was not top-down as monitoring was for every household using technology. The deprived households were all mapped, and progress was measured at household level.

We need a similar last mile community-led action in education, health, nutrition, skills and livelihoods. There must be community validation of all monitoring data as it is only by allowing local communities to assess progress, we can make real breakthroughs. The Mission Antyodaya platform monitoring 216 Sustainable Development Goals targets in rural panchayats after community validation, is an effort in that direction. We need a similar effort in urban areas to know the real performance of programmes. All programmes must have community validation at the local level for data systems to become more credible.

As we move towards higher order technology use, we must be even more conscious of last mile facilitation. Otherwise, an intention to be inclusive can end up in an outcome of exclusion. Technology is only a means and not an end. Inclusive India needs last mile facilitation of deprived households. Community institutions of the poor in rural and urban areas is our best guarantee for a developed India.

The writer is a retired civil servant. Views are personal

Published on October 14, 2025