Over 3.4 lakh ‘fake’ pension beneficiaries detected
CHANDIGARH The Haryana government deactivated the direct benefit transfer (DBT) of pension of over 3.4 lakh beneficiaries for August after it detected irregularities in their Aadhaar number.
Possession of Aadhaar number is mandatory as per an August 2017 state government notification for availing pension, because of which the state social justice and empowerment department undertook a verification exercise following which the irregularities were detected.
There are over 45,000 beneficiaries who have not submitted their Aadhaar numbers, over 91,000, with technically invalid Aadhaar numbers, over 26,000 with Aadhaar numbers registered outside Haryana and over 1.79 lakh beneficiaries with repeated Aadhaar numbers, hence invalid.
“The beneficiaries’ accounts will be reactivated after verification with the original record and updation of correct Aadhaar numbers, if any’’, department principal secretary Ashok Khemka said. Over 23 lakh beneficiaries, pension would be sent to all the about 19 lakh beneficiaries before 10th of every month, he said.
While the department released about Rs 382.34 crore as pensions till July, 2017, in August, the amount was Rs 334.55 crore, thus saving about Rs 50 crore. The department suspects that the likely misappropriation of public money each year by way of wrongful transfers to ineligible and bogus beneficiaries could be huge – Rs 600 to Rs 1,000 crores.
PENSION TO DEAD ? Khemka, however, also held that a large number of beneficiaries in the current database with valid Aadhaar numbers and operative bank accounts had died but pensions continued to be transferred.
“Since, there is no effective mechanism to capture the dead in Aadhaar, the department has proposed to take a ‘living certificate’ each year from the beneficiaries at the citizens service centres using biometrics authenticated, Aadhaar-based e-KYC verification,” he said. The biometric-based Aadhaar verification would be done between January 1 and March 31, each year.
GOVT HAS DEMOLISHED SYSTEM, SAYS INLD Meanwhile, Indian National Lok Dal took a dig at ruling BJP and said that it had demolished all the systems.
“It is not only social justice and empowerment department, grave irregularities are common place in all the departments. The government is just following its ideological parent Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) instructions in all its decisions, be it, employments and giving benefits to any beneficiaries. It has demolished the functioning of all departments’’, INLD spokesperson RS Choudhry said.
Meanwhile, leader of the Haryana Congress legislature party, Kiran Choudhry, demanded a judicial probe into what she termed as Rs 1,000-crore scam involving disbursement of various social security pensions to fake beneficiaries in the state.