Facing flak from the Supreme Court which recently pointed out gaps in the implementation of National Social Assistance Programme (NSAP), dealing with pensions for elderly and other issues, the Centre has come up with a draft social audit guidelines and standard operating procedure to strengthen and ensure its uniformity across the States.
In a letter written recently to all the States, the Union Rural Development Ministry has asked them to provide feedback on the guidelines so as to initiate social audit of the scheme in a pilot mode in 22 States.
The SC while hearing a case last month had remarked that “prima facie” the NSAP was a good scheme but there were “huge gaps” in its implementation which needed to be filled, an observation which the Ministry too, during internal evaluation of the programme primarily found to be true.
The official in the letter admitted that “while NSAP guidelines provides for conducting social audit on six-monthly basis and provisions have been made for financing the social audit through administrative expenses allocated to each State by the Centre, however, it was observed that this part of the Guidelines was not being implemented in letter and spirit.”
A bench of justices Madan B Lokur and Deepak Gupta had said that the Centre must have a machinery to implement the scheme so that it could be known as to which authorities were doing their job properly.
The NSAP comprises of Indira Gandhi National Old Age Pension Scheme, Indira Gandhi National Widow Pension Scheme, Indira Gandhi National Disability Pension Scheme, National Family Benefit Scheme and Annapurna scheme.
The NSAP has a budget of around `9,975 crore in 2018-19 and the government has allotted funds for pension covering around three crore elderly persons under the Indira Gandhi National Old Age Pension Scheme. However, the Court observed that “All this is fine on paper. It case of widows in Vrindavan, I do not think anyone of them has been given any money. You have no idea how many widows are there in Vrindavan and in Jagannath Puri. You read our judgements (in widows matter) and you will get to know,” Justice
Lokur said. Former Union Minister and senior advocate Ashwini Kumar, who has filed a public interest litigation
(PIL) concerning old age persons, told the bench that number of senior citizens have increased from 10.38 crore as per 2011 census.
Only seven states and Union Territories were giving about Rs. 2,000 monthly pension to senior citizens, whose population would increase by over 300 per cent by 2050.
To bring about uniformity in approach, the Social Audit Guidelines and Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) have been prepared to launch the pilot in 22 states, said the letter. The PIL had said there were a large number of aged people, most of whom were living in poverty, without any roof over their heads or proper clothes, food and budgetary allocation for their welfare was also paltry.