Hanoi has loosened the licensing of social organizations to head towards a society of more democracy and better social welfare, Chairman of the Hanoi People’s Committee Nguyen Duc Chung has affirmed. 
Chairman of the Hanoi People's Committee Nguyen Duc Chung. Photo: Minh Tuan
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The associations like those for environmentalists, elderly, blind, and disabled have a wide range of operations, to grassroots level, working to partly supervise the city’s governance, he emphasized.
The social groups also offer recommendations to help the government and the city make better policies for such communities, Chung said in affirming that Hanoi, in particular, has tried to let all people engage in the supervision of the city’s governance.
However, he noted that the groups should operate in accordance with Vietnamese legislation.
Making efforts for better social welfare
Ensuring better social welfare is one of the most important goals which Hanoi has been pursuing over the years, Chung affirmed, noting that people have enjoyed improved healthcare and education.
Meanwhile, other part of people such as elderly, veterans, and disadvantaged are given free accommodation, free-of-charge electricity, soft loans, and social allowances, especially taken care of on the occasion of the Lunar New Year, also known as Tet, the biggest feast of the year.
The mayor affirmed that Hanoi in particular and Vietnam in general spent a significant amount of resources on improving people’s living standards, mostly those in rural areas.
As a result, the poverty rate in Hanoi has fallen to 1.16% while many people get soft loans for vocational training and running household business.
Chung highly appreciated the Nordic society model and said that Hanoi has learned a lot from it. However, each model would require the proper adaptation to make it suitable and effective, Chung added.
