Smart Seva Sanstha- Changing lives of Pune's youth

His life story could well be the plot of a Bollywood movie. An educated youth, Sudarshan Shedge, holds a bachelor’s degree in science, majoring in agriculture. But after completing his education, he had no job, and no steady income. In 2006, in need of employment, Shedge signed up Pune Municipal Corporation’s (PMC) Smart Seva Sanstha as a gardener. Now, five years hence, he has a house of his own, four two-wheelers and employs a support staff, having found financial success as a gardener and landscape designer.

This sanstha has 14 service centres or seva kendras in the city and provides a myriad of services, generating employment for many skilled and unskilled youth in the city. The Smart Seva Sanstha was born in 2002 out of guidelines of the Swarna Jayanti Shahari Rozgar Yojana (SJSRY).

These guidelines, aimed at creating employment opportunities in cities, were customised by the PMC to suit Pune and thus started the first such centre in India. The sanstha offers services like plumbing, gardening, data entry, repairing electronic items, cleaning water pipes, masonry work, carpentry and housekeeping among others.

All the centres are managed by the Department of Urban Community Development, with its deputy commissioner Dnyaneshwar Molak as head. Chief coordinator of the Ghole Road Smart Seva Kendra, Deepak Kadam, informs that the organisation collectively employs around 200 skilled and 140 unskilled workers. Besides these, it also provides about 130 Marathi typing operators in PMC ward offices.

The typists are paid Rs30 per hour, and make up to Rs240 a day. It also employs men and women to distribute property tax bills for Rs3 per bill. Kadam says the organisation generates a whopping Rs18 lakh to Rs20 lakh a year by bill distribution only. Its intra-city courier service charges Rs4.5 per courier. It has also provided data entry operators to Right To Information (RTI) offices.

The services can be availed of with a simple call. “Our employees also conduct primary survey for the Slum Rehabilitation Authority.

They are paid Rs200 for a day’s work. Everyone employed with us has fixed working hours, the timings being 10.30 am to 5.30 pm,” says Kadam. “We are like one big family. We have an annual picnic every year and help each other,” says Kadam. Also, the organisation launched an Ashok Diwali Faral Yojana this year, where women’s self-help groups were chosen to prepare the sweets after a rigorous test at SNDT college.