With the target to complete Aadhaar enrolment of people by March this year, Permanent Enrolment Centres (PECs) in all the block offices of eight Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) districts will be opened by January 25.
This was decided at a meeting chaired by Director Census Operations Odisha Bishnupada Sethi here on Saturday. The DBT districts are Baleswar, Bhadrak, Cuttack, Khordha, Puri, Balangir, Subarnapur and Sundargarh.
The meeting was attended by representatives of the Electronic Corporation of India limited (ECIl) and officers of the Census Operations Odisha. BK Nayak and AK Pramaink of ECIl and P Barad of Census Operations presented the factual position and infrastructure bottlenecks in the districts.
With Chief Secretary JK Mohapatra giving the deadline of March 31 for completion of enrolment, the meeting decided to adhere to the timeline and begin the process immediately, pointed out Sethi to the officers.
The ECIl would provide Data Entry Operators (DEO)s and kits in all the PECs while infrastructure support for all the PECs in rural zones would be provided by the Block Development Officers (BDOs) and tehsildars, and in towns by the municipal Executive Officers.
The ECIl would explore the possibility of adopting the DBT Method for data entry as well as NPR biometric on the spots. More than Rs 50 lakh would be spent on this account as the PECs would continue for at least four months in these blocks, official sources said.
As it is a targeted mission, performance of all the PECs would be reviewed on a fortnightly basis by the Directorate of Census Operations, said the sources.
Earlier, the Chief Secretary has requested the Union Government in the Ministry of Petroleum to extend deadline for implementation of DBT for transfer of subsidy on lPG to the bank accounts of the customers. He has requested for extension of the deadline for the three new DBT districts up to June 30 in the second phase.