DMs fail to cope with DBT innovation; meet called

Innovation has not helped the UPA government to puts its game-changer Direct Benefit Transfer scheme on the fast track, pushing the Prime Minister’s Office to call a meeting of 121 district collectors to Monday to address the problem areas. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Apr 29, 2013, 24:59:41 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Innovation has not helped the UPA government to puts its game-changer Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) scheme on the fast track, pushing the Prime Minister’s Office to call a meeting of 121 district collectors to Monday to address the problem areas.

The government had launched a set of applications through its new portal dbtapps.nic.in to help ground level officials directly upload beneficiary information with the ministries running 25 programmes that were brought under DBT scheme.

The apps were to be downloaded on one’s computer to maintain uniformity.

The government had also provided other technological tools for seeding unique identification or Aadhaar numbers in a person’s bank account but district-level officials have been slow in adopting them.

By the end of March, only 4.2% beneficiaries had their bank accounts seeded with Aadhaar numbers, a must for money transfer under DBT.

“Either there is intellectual incapacity or reluctance to use technology for better governance,” said a senior government official dealing with DBT.

He added that the district collectors on Monday would be instructed to hold special training for ground level staff to use technological innovations.

The meeting is the first one after PM Manmohan Singh-headed committee decided to extend DBT to another 78 districts by July this year.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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