Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot on Thursday termed the Centre's welfare measures for children who lost their parents to Covid-19 "defective" and demanded that they be revised as they did not provide immediate relief.
He also claimed the Centre did not announce any scheme to help women whose husbands succumbed to the disease.
Gehlot was speaking during a video conference on Covid vaccination.
On May 29, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced a number of welfare measures, including providing financial assistance, for children who lost their parents to Covid-19 .
According to the Prime Minister's Office (PMO), fixed deposits will be opened in the names of such children, and the PM-CARES fund will contribute through a specially designed scheme to create a corpus of Rs 10 lakh for each of them.
This corpus will be used to give the beneficiaries a monthly stipend from 18 years of age for the next five years. On reaching the age of 23, they will get the corpus amount as one lump-sum for personal and professional use.
Gehlot said the Centre's package did not provide immediate relief, which was of utmost importance, to the children who lost their parents to Covid-19 .