Faced with the herculean task of removing undeserving people and adding real beneficiaries into the database of National Food Security Act, the department of Food and Civil Supplies has decided to synchronise their activities with ‘Yojna Banao Abhiyan’ and requested all deputy commissioners to sensitise the project planning team to encourage people to surrender as well as claim benefits under the NFSA.
The department has identified around 1.42-lakh people who made their way into the NFSA’s list of beneficiaries without qualifying for benefits under the ambitious scheme and will be deleting those names from the database. The deadline of purging the list has been extended till February 15. Under the Act, around 1.4-lakh metric tonne of food grains—rice and wheat—is expected to be distributed among eligible beneficiaries.
“We have extended the deadline to February 15 and have asked all deputy commissioners to sensitise the project planning team of Yojna Banao Abhiyan to motivate people so that people come forward to register their name in the list and those who do not deserve benefits surrender their card,” said Food and Civil Supplies Secretary Vinay Kumar Choubey.
Earlier, the department had set the deadline of January 31 to cleanse the database, however, the task is far from complete despite claims of verification having been completed in all the districts. The 1.42-lakh names would be deleted gradually from the list of beneficiaries as a team of officials from the headquarter at Ranchi would embark on field visits to other districts to further the verification process for removing those names that did not deserve food grains under the largest programme to end hunger.
Choubey added, “A team of officials would be heading to districts which have been assigned to them and they would look into removing names from the database”, and the officials would also examine performance of public-distribution-system besides, other details related to NFSA.
Incidentally, the rural project planning scheme includes organising discussion programme for three days for a cluster of 100 families each in all the panchayats to frame village development plans. The Yojna Banao Abhiyan would extend up to February 24 and during the course of the programme around 600 resource persons besides, 22,000 panchayat planning members will be interacting with people at the bottom of the prosperity ladder.
Convergence of the two objectives of the two NDA flagship scheme is an attempt of the department to achieve success of the scheme which is suffocating due to allegations of rampant corruption and poor supply chain. The scheme made a delayed start in Jharkhand and presence of fake beneficiaries had been the Achilles’ heels for the department.
