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Centre wants probe on Covid ex gratia ‘racket’
This order came on two petitions filed in public interest by advocates Gaurav Kumar Bansal and Reepak Kansal. On October 4, the court quantified the compensation at ₹50,000 to be paid by the state disaster response funds.
The Supreme Court should order an investigation into “illegal rackets” that are possibly running in cahoots with public officials to illicitly collect ₹50,000 compensation for every death due to Covid-19, the central government pleaded on Saturday.
Filing an application in this regard before a bench led by justice MR Shah, the government made a request to let it probe into instances of misuse of the Supreme Court order in June last year to compensate the relatives of those who died due to Covid-19 under the Disaster Management Act, 2005.
This order came on two petitions filed in public interest by advocates Gaurav Kumar Bansal and Reepak Kansal. On October 4, the court quantified the compensation at ₹50,000 to be paid by the state disaster response funds.
The new application contends that the repeated directions of the court to expeditiously disburse compensation has thrown up the problem of fraudulent claims.
“In absence of any verification and scrutiny of the claim forms, some unscrupulous persons in the society started realising such ex-gratia payments on the basis of forged and fake claim documents. Further, the reports received also do not rule out connivance of the local level officers appointed to clear the claims and existence of illegal rackets being flourishing to obtain ex-gratia payment granted by this Hon’ble court on forged and fake documents,” read the application, reviewed by HT.
The government implored the bench to permit “any central agency to undertake a sample scrutiny to verify the claimed documents processed by respective state governments for grant of ex-gratia payment and take steps thereafter in accordance with the law”.
The application is expected to come up for a hearing before the bench, which also comprises justice BV Nagarathna, on March 21.
On March 7, the Centre, through solicitor general Tushar Mehta, informed the court that some doctors were writing fake prescriptions for Covid-19 treatment. Due to the threshold of RT-PCR report or certificate of Covid-19 treatment by doctors for claims, such misuse was reported from many states, the government said.
During the last hearing on March 14, the bench observed that an enquiry by the Comptroller and Auditor General may be necessary to probe the possible misuse.
“We never visualized that our order could be misused,” the bench lamented while allowing the central government to move an application for a probe into the illegal claims.
In its new application, the Centre has recommended an outer limit of four weeks within which a claimant must approach the authorities for compensation, underlining that a deadline is desirable.
All genuine claimants must have approached the authorities by establishing their claims by now, the government said. On November 29, the court had ordered wide publicity about the compensation.
The court started monitoring compensation payouts after it noticed that some states were trying to defeat its orders through lack of publicity, rejecting applications on technical grounds, and insisting upon documents and formalities for claiming ex gratia.
On March 14, the court clarified that the compensation was a one-time payment and only one family member will be entitled to receive it. This was in response to an Assam government query on whether the compensation was to be paid to each orphan of parents who had died of Covid-19.
