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Public Accounts Committee to review Centre’s welfare schemes
The PAC, which is Parliament’s audit watchdog, will review the banking and insurance sector and the energy reforms
New Delhi: The Public Accounts Committee (PAC), led by Congress’s Lok Sabha leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, on Tuesday decided to review the welfare schemes of the NDA government.
The PAC, which is Parliament’s audit watchdog, will also review the banking and insurance sector and the energy reforms, according to people aware of the details.
The decisions were taken as Chowdhury, who was suspended from the Lower House last month for alleged “gross and deliberate misconduct”, chaired his first meeting after his reinstatement. Trinamool Congress’s Derek O’Brien attended the PAC meeting for the first time after being nominated to the committee.
The plan to review the schemes and assess their performance on the ground is seen as “important” by a number of members, a senior lawmaker and member of the committee said.
“Social welfare measures have been developed as an important tool to create a vote bank of beneficiaries of such schemes. The Prime Minister had mentioned how the NDA government has given basic facilities to a large number of people for the first time in 75 years. In this context, a review by the PAC would be an important exercise,” the lawmaker said, seeking anonymity.
Another PAC member, however, wondered how the panel can review the entire architecture of the social welfare schemes and its effectiveness on the ground. “There are no CAG reports on the overall impact even as CAG, from time to time, has submitted reports on individual schemes,” the member said.
