Tathagata CHATTERJI, Xavier University Bhubaneswar, India
Debashrita TRIPATHI, Xavier University Bhubaneswar, India
The ongoing Covid-19 crisis has thrown fresh spotlight on capacity challenges faced by local governments across the world and more acutely in developing countries. As front-line responders in crisis response, recovery, and rebuilding, local governments are required to engage with people more extensively during disaster situations. However, their ability to do so, in an agile manner are often constrained due to inadequate functional autonomy, financial distress and lack of adequate human resources. The question of state capacity, especially at the local government level, are thus linked to institutional structures of government, with regards to multilevel governance systems, as disaster management responsibilities are usually shared across tiers. Moreover, state capacity also has a relational dimension, and depends upon embeddedness of the state in society. In democratic societies, civil society groups help state agencies to reach out to people. This paper explores roles of women-led self help groups (SHG) in augmenting urban local government capacities in Odisha, India. The SHGs, were originally organised as part of anti-poverty programmes launched by the state governments (e.g. Mission Shakti). However, during the Covid crisis, they became effective force multipliers for the urban local bodies and became crucial intermediaries in reaching out to affected communities. Being neighbourhood based, they provided last mile connectivity in relief operations by providing services such as: arrangement of ambulances and hospitals for the seriously ill, contact tracing, monitoring people in quarantine and delivery of food and medicines to those in need. We demonstrate that the ability of the urban local bodies to effectively deploy the SHGs are partly linked to prior experience, the covid crisis has brought in a more transformative change in local government capacities and the SHGs are now being deployed in various other civic functions.
Mots clés :
A103370TC