Areas Of Work

Training and Capacity Building

NATIONAL TRAINING

In order to capacitate and facilitate the community on the budgets especially the SCSP/TSP, DAAA organises, an annual, a four day training programme on “Understanding Budgets, Policy and Advocacy: Scheduled Caste Sub Plan/Tribal Sub Plan and Gender Budgets”. The training was instituted in 2015.

REGIONAL TRAINING

In addition regional trainings are also organised. The need for the regional training arose from the national training conducted earlier in the year and was based on the reflections and ideas from the national training.

FELLOWSHIPS

DAAA in order to ensure Dalit/Adivasi women’s participation and leadership in budget work, and to impart the skills to access their rights and entitlements provided fellowship to Dalit women in this year. The fellowship helps to provide hands on training to women activists on budget analysis, monitoring and filing of RTIs, advocacy with the state governments, filing PILs accessing schemes etc.

Evidence Building

To track budgets and ensure access of economic rights by the community the movement analyses Union and budgets of 15 states. In addition we also analyse government economic policies like— policy to merge the plan and non-plan, and 14thFinance Commission recommendations.

In addition thematic research is conducted on— higher education, gender budgeting, Tribal Sub Plan, Status of Sub-Plan implementation, child rights and access to schemes at Panchayat level.

National and State Advocacy

Any analysis is incomplete without linking it to its logical end. In order to ensure Dalit and Adivasi communities’ access to economic rights, the movement works through national and state level advocacy on budget analysis. We conduct with Panchayat members, and submit memorandums are all levels of governance.

Based on the budget analysis both under the sub-plans as well as thematic, extensive advocacy is conducted from national to international level, making necessary interventions at every stage.

Higher Education Campaign

‘The backward classes have come to realize that after all education is the greatest material benefit for which they can fight. We may forego material benefits, we may forego material benefits of civilization, but we cannot forego our right and opportunities to reap the benefit of the highest education to the fullest extent. That is the importance of this question from the point of view of the backward classes who have just realized that without education their existence is not safe.’

— B.R. AMBEDKAR

The suicide of a Dalit PhD scholar, Rohit Vemula saw a coming together of Dalit-Adivasi students to demand their right to higher education. In the light of these developments, we launched a campaign in 13 states namely UP, Bihar, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan, Odisha, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Jharkhand on higher education.

Our experience of working with students over the years through CADRE, brought to fore, rampant instances of discrimination and exclusion being closely tied to absence of financial assistance and absence of structures to address instances of discrimination and exclusion. Such a scenario called for a renewed urgent need to address the underlying reasons for discrimination and exclusion rampant in higher educational institutions. The campaign was designed to make necessary intervention to ensure equal and equitable access to higher education by Dalit and Adivasi students.

All the states focussed on organising student meeting, CSO/CLO outreach, filling Post Matric Scholarship forms, filling RTIs and conducting advocacy to ensure Dalit and Adivasi students’ access to education.