LPG subsidy in bank accounts from October

In a big push to the game-changer direct benefit transfer scheme, the UPA government is set to transfer subsidy for cooking gas to 14 crore consumers in your banks accounts seeded with unique identification or Aadhaar number from October this year. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Apr 30, 2013, 01:10:37 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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In a big push to the game-changer direct benefit transfer scheme, the UPA government is set to transfer subsidy for cooking gas to 14 crore consumers in your banks accounts seeded with unique identification or Aadhaar number from October this year.

Senior UPA government functionaries told district collectors from 121 districts on Monday that there was a great level of “satisfaction” over roll-out of LPG subsidy through Aadhaar based payment platform and would aim to cover the entire country from October.

A consumer is expected to get subsidy of Rs 4,000 every year with the government imposing a cap of 9 subsidised cylinders in a year. The consumers will have to buy the LPG cylinder at the market rate of around Rs 900 (in Delhi) and the subsidy will be transferred directly into an Aadhaar linked bank account.

Although LPG would be first to seen nation-wide DBT roll-out, the government pushed the district collectors to improve coverage of beneficiaries under the 25 schemes on Aadhaar based direct transfer module.

Only around 67,000 people of the 16 lakh beneficiaries under these schemes in 43 pilot districts have both Aadhaar number and bank accounts, must for implementing DBT. The government had introduced DBT in 20 districts from January 1, which was expanded to 43 by March. The Planning Commission, which is nodal office for implementing the scheme, recently told Prime Minister’s Office that slow digitization of beneficiary data was one of the reason for DBT hiccups.

Admitting of problems in DBT, planning commission deputy chairperson Montek Singh Ahluwalia told HT a special effort is required to take the scheme ahead. He, however, said that it was as of now moving in the right direction considering India’s huge diversity and ground level problems.

The commission has told the collectors that all new beneficiaries under the scholarship and pension schemes should be on the DBT mode. To start with, the districts collectors have been asked to target students who enroll fresh in 121 districts that would come under ambit of DBT from July 1.

Another area of concern for the commission was no information on how much money the state governments was spending on similar schemes like scholarships and pensions and there was no data to check whether same person was receiving benefit from two programmes.

The commission also admitted that to avoid audit objections the ministries have devised schemes in such a way that it was difficult to find out whether the beneficiaries were actually receiving money or not. Concern was also raised over the poor spread of banking correspondents, who are required to disburse the DBT entitlements at the doorstep of beneficiaries.

Total beneficiaries under DBT: 16 lakh

Those having both Aadhaar number and a bank account: 5.31 lakh

Bank accounts having Aadhaar numbers: 67,000

Total money disbursed since January under DBT: Rs 23 crore

Total Aadhaar numbers generated so far : 32 crore

Aadhaar letters dispatched: 24 crore

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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