Social Defence Initiatives by the National Institute of Social Defence

Protecting the dignity of those pushed to society’s margins requires more than welfare cheques. It demands trained professionals, thoughtful policies, and institutions that can coordinate across government, civil society, and communities. The National Institute of Social Defence (NISD) sits at the heart of this mission in India, working as the nodal training and research body for matters of social defence. Its Social Defence Division focuses on rebuilding the psychosocial well-being of groups often left out of mainstream welfare, from older adults and transgender persons to people affected by substance abuse and those engaged in begging.

What social defence actually means 🔗

Social defence is a framework for protecting vulnerable populations from marginalization, exclusion, and harm. It is broader than charity and more targeted than general welfare. While social defence covers the entire gamut of activities and programmes for protecting society, in practice NISD concentrates on human resource development in four priority areas: drug abuse prevention, welfare of senior citizens, welfare of transgender persons, and beggary prevention.

NISD itself has an interesting institutional history. It began in 1961 as the Central Bureau of Correctional Services under the Ministry of Home Affairs, moved through the Department of Social Security, and in 2002 became an autonomous body registered under the Societies Act. Today it functions under the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, with its headquarters in Dwarka, New Delhi.

The Social Defence Division and its working approach 🔗

The Social Defence Division does not run shelters or directly deliver services to beneficiaries on a large scale. Instead, it builds capacity in the system. It trains trainers, sensitizes police and panchayat functionaries, partners with NGOs, and produces research and curricula that other agencies then use on the ground. This “institution of institutions” model means that a single programme at NISD can ripple outward and improve service delivery across dozens of states.

The division’s scale is significant. In 2017-18 alone, NISD conducted 131 training and sensitization programmes covering 9,339 trainees. These numbers have grown steadily, with the institute now running regional collaborations across the country. Its partners include State Level Coordinating Agencies (SLCAs), Regional Resource and Training Centres (RRTCs), police academies, and State Institutes of Rural Development (SIRDs), among others.

How programmes are designed 🔗

Most programmes follow a layered structure. Short awareness sessions of one day are used to reach large numbers of frontline workers, teachers, or students. Three-day residential trainings go deeper into specific issues such as dementia care or counselling skills. Longer diploma courses, some lasting a year, train specialist professionals such as geriatric care workers. On top of this, NISD runs TAPAS, an online learning management platform offering self-paced certificate courses on elderly care, substance abuse prevention, and transgender issues.

Supporting senior citizens 🔗

India’s elderly population is projected to cross 300 million by 2050. Isolation, financial dependence, neglect, and health vulnerabilities make seniors one of the most quietly at-risk groups. NISD’s Old Age Care Division addresses this through a mix of training, awareness, and research.

Its offerings include three-day residential training programmes on basic geriatric care, geriatric counselling, dementia care and management, yoga for senior citizens, and music therapy. A postgraduate diploma in gerontology trains a cadre of specialists for old age homes and hospitals. One-day programmes on the Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act, 2007 help panchayat members and anganwadi workers understand their legal responsibilities.

In a notable recent development, the National Council for Vocational Education and Training (NCVET) recognized NISD as an Awarding Body in the geriatrics category, which lets the institute assess and certify learners directly. This is a meaningful shift because it formalizes care work as a skilled profession and builds a pipeline of trained geriatric workers.

Response during the COVID-19 crisis 🔗

The pandemic hit senior citizens hardest. NISD responded by issuing advisories for safe practices in old age homes, moving training programmes online, and coordinating with state authorities on relief for elderly persons in institutional care. Relief funds were channelled to those in acute need, and the institute’s online modules on the TAPAS platform became a practical tool when in-person training was impossible.

Working with transgender persons 🔗

The Transgender and Beggary Division handles one of the most stigmatized areas of social policy. After the Supreme Court’s NALSA judgement in 2014 and the passage of the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019, the state acquired clear legal obligations toward the community. Implementation, however, depends on whether police officers, panchayat members, teachers, and social workers actually understand what those rights mean in daily life. That is where NISD’s sensitization work comes in.

The division runs three-day training programmes for government, NGO, and panchayat functionaries, and separate three-day programmes for police personnel on transgender and beggary issues. Five-day counselling-skills workshops train stakeholders to handle the psychosocial dimensions of their work without reproducing stigma.

Skill development for livelihoods 🔗

Awareness alone does not put food on the table. Under the SMILE Scheme – Support for Marginalized Individuals for Livelihood and Enterprise – NISD coordinates skill training meant to provide real employment pathways. The scheme merges earlier programmes for transgender persons and beggars into a single comprehensive rehabilitation framework covering medical facilities, counselling, education, skill development, and economic linkages.

For transgender persons, training areas are chosen through national consultations with the community, and courses are delivered free of cost with 100% grants from the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment. Participants between 18 and 45 years of age with a valid transgender certificate can enrol in short-term, long-term, or recognition-of-prior-learning programmes. Stipends and placement support follow successful completion.

Tackling beggary with dignity 🔗

Beggary is one of the most legally and socially complicated issues NISD works on. As the Department of Social Justice and Empowerment notes, the word ‘beggar’ or ‘beggary’ is not mentioned in any list of the Constitution, while “Vagrancy” appears as a Concurrent subject under entry 15 of the Concurrent List. This has produced a patchwork of state-level anti-beggary laws with very different standards of implementation.

NISD’s approach is to shift from the older criminalization model to rehabilitation. The institute coordinates pilot projects in cities with large beggar populations, supports skill development, and trains state and civil society actors. In 2019-20, the Ministry released Rs. 1 crore to NISD for skill development programmes for beggars, indicating the scale at which the institute is expected to operate.

A recent example of ground-level work was a two-day training programme on “Special Services for Children Engaged in the Act of Begging” conducted in August 2025 at NISD, New Delhi. The programme brought together Child Welfare Committee members, state officials, and leading NGOs to strengthen legal frameworks, rehabilitation strategies, and inter-agency coordination for children in street situations.

Drug abuse prevention and rehabilitation 🔗

Substance abuse cuts across all of NISD’s other focus areas – many older people, transgender persons, and individuals engaged in begging also struggle with addiction. The Drug Abuse Prevention Division treats this not as a moral failing but as a complex public health and social issue.

The division develops guidelines for rehabilitation centres, empanels NGOs to run Integrated Rehabilitation Centres for Addicts (IRCAs), and trains counsellors and outreach workers. Recent sessions covered understanding substance use disorders, client assessment and referral pathways, crisis intervention, and community-based interventions under the Nasha Mukt Bharat Abhiyaan (Drug-Free India campaign). Resource persons are often drawn from AIIMS’s National Drug Dependence Treatment Centre and Delhi University.

Why networks matter more than single interventions 🔗

One of NISD’s quiet strengths is stakeholder coordination. Drug abuse prevention succeeds only when hospitals, police, schools, NGOs, and families pull in the same direction. The institute functions as a central coordinator, convening conferences, running joint training programmes for personnel from different organizations, and maintaining knowledge-sharing platforms. This network model is what allows a relatively small organization to have a national footprint.

The larger pattern: capacity building as social defence 🔗

Looking across all these initiatives, a pattern emerges. NISD rarely delivers services directly to beneficiaries at scale. Instead, it produces the people, curricula, standards, and partnerships that make service delivery possible across India. A trained police officer who understands the Transgender Persons Act, an anganwadi worker who knows how to spot elder abuse, a counsellor who can handle withdrawal, an NGO with guidelines for running an addiction rehabilitation centre – these are the concrete outputs of NISD’s work.

There are also limits worth acknowledging. An evaluation report on NISD’s functioning found that about 71.1% of students from the Old Age Care Division’s one-year and three-month training programmes were placed, but a significant share remained unplaced. The report also noted that skill development programmes need to be conducted in larger cities to improve uptake, and that course content needs regular upgradation to keep pace with current technology and field needs. These are not fatal weaknesses, but they point to the challenge of scaling specialized training in a country as diverse as India.

Even with these constraints, NISD’s institutional logic – treating dignity as something that requires trained professionals and coordinated systems rather than goodwill alone – is a meaningful contribution to how India thinks about welfare. The groups it serves are among the easiest to ignore and the hardest to help well. Building the human infrastructure for that help is slow, unglamorous work, and someone has to do it.

What do you think? Should social defence continue to focus on training and capacity building as its core method, or should NISD move toward direct service delivery to reach more beneficiaries faster? And when you look at the four priority groups – elderly, transgender persons, people affected by substance abuse, and those engaged in begging – which do you think faces the greatest gap between policy on paper and lived reality?

References

1. https://www.nisd.gov.in/
2. https://socialjustice.gov.in/common/49566
3. https://transgender.dosje.gov.in/docs/NISDJournal.pdf
4. https://tapas.dosje.gov.in/about.php
5. https://www.nisd.gov.in/old_age_training.html
6. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2115316
7. https://www.nisd.gov.in/social_defence.html
8. https://transgender.dosje.gov.in/HomeN/Index/
9. https://transgender.dosje.gov.in/Applicant/Registration/DisplayForm3
10. https://socialjustice.gov.in/common/47564
11. https://www.govserv.org/IN/Delhi/100806184740114/National-Institute-of-Social-Defence—NISD
12. https://socialjustice.gov.in/public/ckeditor/upload/Summary%20Rpt_Evaluation%20Report_NISD_1648795165.pdf