Govt cash transfer system is old wine in new bottle

The direct cash transfer in 42 schemes to start from next year is old wine in new bottle with beneficiaries under these schemes already receiving money directly into their bank accounts. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Nov 30, 2012, 02:18:20 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The direct cash transfer in 42 schemes to start from next year is old wine in new bottle with beneficiaries under these schemes already receiving money directly into their bank accounts.

Finance minister P Chidambaram and rural development minister Jairam Ramesh on Tuesday announced that money under these 42 schemes of the central government would be transferred directly into bank accounts of beneficiaries in 51 districts from next January.

The list of the schemes shows that it includes 22 scholarship programmes of the nine Central government ministries. It has also national social assistance programme having five schemes and Dhan Laxmi scheme of WCD ministry and Janani Suraksha Yojana of health ministry. Under these schemes the money is being transferred directly into bank accounts of beneficiaries.

"The big difference would be that the beneficiaries would get money faster," a senior Planning Commission official said. But, for that, they will have to get an Aadhaar number, for which they would get time till March 2013.

In the present system, the money is first transferred to the institution responsible for disbursing the money and then it gets electronically transferred into bank accounts of the beneficiaries. For example, the University Grants Commission transfers the scholarship money into the bank account of the university, where the student is enrolled. The university then transfers the money into account of the intended students.

Government officials said in the new Unique Identification or Aadhaar enabled direct cash transfer system the money would be directly transferred into bank accounts of the beneficiaries. "Aadhaar number would act as bank account number," a government official said.

The benefit of direct transfer in the existing cash schemes is more for the government than the beneficiaries as the government would able to monitor utilization of funds under different schemes from one point. Officials admitted that cash transfer under existing schemes may not end harassment of beneficiaries to withdraw the funds as experienced in many states.

As majority of the schemes to come under government's direct cash transfer scheme are regarding scholarships, the government is planning to create a national scholarship portal to provide single window information on scholarships for different categories of students such as minorities, scheduled caste and tribes and economically backward.

State governments of Madhya Pradesh and Tamil Nadu have scholarship portals helping students to track their applications and also money and now the Central government wants to have similar portals under the national e-governance programme.

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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