The suggestion was made by Dreze at a three-day International Conference on Gender Equality (ICGE II 2021), organised by the Gender Park under Kerala governments Department of Women and Child Development in association with UN Women on Thursday. 

The scheme, which he called as Decentralized Urban Employment and Training (DUET), could be utilized for keeping public places like educational institutions, hospitals and bus and railway stations clean by taking the services of jobless people in cities and towns. At least one third of such jobs under DUET could be offered to women, Dr Dreze said and explained that under the scheme the government should issue job stamps to the employers instead of providing funds in cash in order to eliminate corruption in the form of ghost employees. Such employment should be offered only to those enrolled with workers' cooperatives to be launched under the scheme. He appealed to the Kerala government to try out the suggestion through a pilot project before scaling it up.