When the procedural step is missing, a demand-driven programme starts behaving like a supply-driven one.
The rural employment guarantee was designed to respond when registered workers ask for work. In practice, families waited to be selected, because nobody had explained that a written demand was a thing you could submit and follow.
The Kaam Mango - Demand the Job - campaign ran across Chittaura, Payagpur and Mihinpurwa in March 2009. It did not present employment as something an organisation would provide. It concentrated on workers’ capacity to activate a public programme in their own names.
DEHAT facilitated the practical information: what the demand provision says, what the written format looks like, where it goes. Workers decided to apply and supplied their own job-card and household details.
Three thousand eight hundred and seventy-nine job-card holders submitted written employment demands. The reported result was 18,322 person-days of work.
A dated written demand creates a traceable relationship between a worker and the institution that owes them. An informal request creates nothing at all. That is the difference the campaign was built around.
DEHAT enabled the capacity, the formats and the connections. Workers were the claimants. Gram Panchayats and programme authorities remained responsible for registering the demands, allocating the work and paying the wages.
A form became an instrument of agency.
Procedure Is the Entitlement
Legal literacy campaigns are short, cheap and measurable. The knowledge does not leave when the campaign does.