- Strengthening the legal and judicial protection of Dalits under the Scheduled Castes and Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act:
- The Commission can facilitate online reporting and trackingof crime.
- It can make people aware of the process of filing the cases by framing and making available simplified Standard Operating Procedures in local languages at all the police stations.
- Capacity building and sensitisation of the institutions:The Commission can help in capacity building of lawyers, judges and policemen. This can ensure their empathetic engagement with members from Scheduled Castes.
- The Commission can help sensitize at least the government institutions and organisations by regularly monitoring their grievance redressal mechanisms like internal complaints committee.
- Ensuring effective implementation of existing government policies:The Commission can discuss with legislators and prioritise outcome-oriented fund expenditure across the Ministries.
- Each ministry is supposed to set aside 15% of its spending in a Scheduled Caste Sub Plan. The Commission can restructure these funds for employment generation and self-employment, capacity building, including soft skills of Dalits.
- Effectiveness and impacts of existing schemes can be monitored by the Commission regularly.
- Scheduled Caste Sub Plan
- Every year, the Union Budget makes allocations exclusively for the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe.
- This fund is spent through the Scheduled Caste Sub Plan (SCSP) and the Tribal Sub Plan (TSP).
- All Central Ministries and departments are obligated to set aside funds under the SCSP and the TSP.
- Incentivise Good Social Work:
- Innovation, effectiveness, and positive impact of the work done by a department or a body can be rewarded by the Commission.
- The Commission has a constitutional mandate to participate in the social and economic planning for SC welfare — it should use this mandate to guide the civil services that engage with the ground level realities in the country.
- Better engagement with civil society:The Commission can create a platform for structured engagement with civil society groups working on Dalit issues.
- Behavioural nudge:The Commission can identify social practices that promote discrimination and can help civil society and the government organise debates, deliberations, awareness campaigns around them.
- Facilitate economic empowerment and entrepreneurship:
- It can discuss and encourage Universities to frame short term courses on entrepreneurship. It can also ensure that measures taken by the government in this direction reach their beneficiaries- for example Stand Up India Scheme.
- It can encourage a participative approach to promote economic empowerment by engaging with the ideas proposed by the members of the community.
- It can promote skills and small business development in the service economy.
- Members of Scheduled Castes are not usually landowners or agriculturists. So they need help in integrating and competing with local and other markets which can be done through mentoring and other non-financial support.
- Preparing for future challenges by facilitating inter-disciplinary research:The Commission can invite Central universities and civil society to first identify the five biggest challenges that Dalits are likely to face in the next five years and to suggest ways to mitigate them.
NCSC is mandated to curb violence against Dalits through various powers. It is desirable for the Commission to engage in an internal evaluation of its priorities on an ongoing basis and to redefine them in a substantively more egalitarian way so as to accomplish its mandate in the spirit in which it was intended.
