Ramesh lays blame for DBT dampener on banks

Direct benefit transfer (DBT), the UPA government’s ‘game changer’ has been slow in taking off primarily due to lukewarm response from the banks, said rural development minister Jairam Ramesh insisting the “huge challenge” with DBT was to get the banks on board.

Updated on: Jun 11, 2013, 02:03:25 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Direct benefit transfer (DBT), the UPA government’s ‘game changer’ has been slow in taking off primarily due to lukewarm response from the banks, said rural development minister Jairam Ramesh insisting the “huge challenge” with DBT was to get the banks on board.

Preferring to call it Direct-To-Home (DTH) money, Ramesh said the scheme was launched on January 1, 2013 across 43 districts, but only about 6 % of the total beneficiaries were on the Aadhaar-based money transfer platform till April-end.

“The response from the public sector banks is lukewarm. That is the reason we have to move to post offices for DBT,” he suggested. The government has announced to put his ministry’s national rural employment guarantee scheme on DBT mode from October 2013 after computerisation of post offices in 51 districts.

Another roadblock identified by Ramesh, was absence of banking correspondents to disburse money to beneficiaries at their doorsteps. “We have to look at Andhra Pradesh as a model where women self help groups have been notified as banking correspondents,” he told HT. The rural development ministry has allowed Anaganwadi and health workers to be appointed as banking correspondents.

Acknowledging that the DBT has potential to check leakages, the minister said the present financial rules were a big impediment in the fast flow of funds to the implementing agencies and was a reason for slow implementation of the social sector schemes.

“We cannot have a system where most of the funds to ministries are released in February and March (fag end of a financial year) and then the finance ministry refuses to provide money at the beginning of a financial year saying there is a huge opening balance,” he said.

The minister, who has the biggest social sector funding, believes the government departments’ need to infuse “transparency” and “accountability” in the way public money is used. “I think DTH is a step in this direction,” he added.

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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