Kamru Jamaal’s life would be easier if he got the monthly pension of Rs 1,000 that New Delhi’s municipal corporations are supposed to pay their poor senior citizens. At 73, he makes a living driving a cycle-rickshaw on the streets of North Delhi’s Kingsway Camp area.
“I can’t remember how long I haven’t been paid a pension,” said Jamaal, who migrated to Delhi from Bihar’s Supaul district decades ago in search of a livelihood.


The money would have also allowed Ram Pyari, a widow who lives in a hut in North Delhi’s GTB Nagar area, to be independent of her two daughters, both domestic workers. On the record, Ram Pyari is 64, but she is clearly a lot older: the year of her birth has been wrongly entered in her Aadhaar card, she said – and age restricts her movement.
The pension was not much, but it was vital for Ram Pyari. “The pension wasn’t enough to buy gold or silver but it took care of hunger,” she said.
Kamru Jamaal and Ram Pyari are among nearly 200,000 impoverished senior citizens of Delhi who lost their pensions in 2013, a year after Delhi’s municipal corporation was trifurcated into North, South and East districts. The administrative split had depleted the corporation’s resources and there were no funds to pay poor elderly citizens, the newly created corporations headed by the Bharatiya Janata Party explained.
There are currently 1.14 million elderly persons in Delhi. The stipend used to be paid to anyone above 60 years of age with no support or income, whose annual income from all sources had been less than Rs 48,000. These applicants were not allowed to access other government pension schemes, such as the one run by the Delhi state government.

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