Sascha Wil­son

As the gov­ern­ment rolls out its sec­ond COVID-19 so­cial sup­port pro­gramme for af­fect­ed cit­i­zens, Bar­rack­pore West coun­cil­lor Nicholas Kan­hai says more has to be done to en­sure that the most vul­ner­a­ble ben­e­fits from those grants.

In a re­lease, Kan­hai com­plained that 57 per cent of the peo­ple with­in his dis­trict who ap­plied for var­i­ous grants last year did not re­ceive them.

He said his of­fice print­ed, com­plet­ed, scanned the forms and the rel­e­vant doc­u­ments and emailed them for the ap­pli­cants to the rel­e­vant min­istries.

Kan­hai said they ap­plied for rental as­sis­tance, pub­lic as­sis­tance, tem­po­rary food card sup­port and the salary re­lief grant.

How­ev­er, he said 82 res­i­dents re­ceived the grants while 109 oth­ers nev­er heard from the min­istry.

Con­cerned over the an­nounce­ment that the COVID-19 In­come Sup­port Grant & Salary Re­lief Grant ap­pli­ca­tions will be avail­able in the com­ing days, he said, “The econ­o­my nev­er got a chance to re­cov­er from last year which means much more fam­i­lies have suf­fered a loss of in­come or even to­tal un­em­ploy­ment. The vol­ume of ap­pli­ca­tions will be over­whelm­ing and it is avail­able on­ly for the month of May.”

Now, with the coun­try un­der a state of emer­gency, he ques­tioned, “If these grants are de­signed to as­sist the most vul­ner­a­ble in so­ci­ety, is it re­al­ly ac­ces­si­ble to them? You are caus­ing peo­ple to flock to an of­fice to get as­sis­tance? Coun­ter­pro­duc­tive?”

He com­plained that the gov­ern­ment has com­plete­ly ex­clud­ed them from the process. Since the lock­down mea­sures were an­nounced, he has re­ceived over 500-plus re­quests for food sup­port from the most vul­ner­a­ble in his dis­trict.

“The num­bers are grow­ing every day. We need to en­sure that fam­i­lies that are in the great­est need re­ceive the great­est sup­port.”

He added that their ef­forts must be geared to­wards sus­tain­ing life and not fur­ther in­creas­ing peo­ple’s vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty.”

At a re­cent press con­fer­ence, Im­bert an­nounced that 20,000 peo­ple are el­i­gi­ble for the in­come sup­port and salary re­lief grants which will on­ly be ac­ces­si­ble to peo­ple af­fect­ed in May.

He said peo­ple who lost em­ploy­ment in the be­gin­ning of the month would re­ceive $1,500 while those who lost their in­come with­in the last “cou­ple of days” would re­ceive $1,000.

Up to last month, Im­bert said the min­istry paid out 85,447 salary re­lief grants. How­ev­er, he said 7,000 peo­ple who were ap­proved still have not re­ceived the funds be­cause of prob­lems with their bank in­for­ma­tion.

Im­bert said they will be paid with deb­it cards.