MADURAI
Tamil Nadu government’s announcement that ₹ 2,000 will be deposited to those below poverty line (BPL) seems to have caused considerable anxiety among the poor in rural areas if the number of people who visited Madurai Collectorate on Monday seeking their inclusion in beneficiaries list was anything to go by.
Kodimangalam, T. Krishnapuram, Gandhigramam, Kancharampettai, and Thullukutti Naickanur were some of the villages from where people, mostly middle-aged and elderly women, visited Collectorate regarding the issue.
Their primary concerns were fear of exclusion and lack of clarity and transparency on how the beneficiaries were being chosen.
“In our village, the beneficiaries list is being collected by the person who disburses our salary under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS). The person tells us that we are not on the list even though we are poor,” said S. Dhanapackiam (45) from Kodimangalam, whose family gets 35 kilogram rice per month under the Antyodaya Anna Yojana (AAY) scheme meant for the poorest of the poor.
A. Pandi, an elderly person from Gandhigramam village in Kallanai panchayat, said that though majority of the households in their village were farm labourers, only a handful had been included under the BPL list.
“There were no enquiries or visits by officials to actually check who is poor,” he said.
P. Chinnaponnu from T. Krishnapuram village said that undeserving people were being included in the list while those are actually poor had been left out. “The same happened with distribution of goats free of cost by the government,” she alleged.
An official from the district administration, speaking on anonymity, acknowledged that there were lot of confusions in identifying the beneficiaries. “The BPL data we have is not foolproof as it was compiled in a hurry many years before,” he said.
Conceding that there were some confusions, a senior official from the district administration overseeing the enumeration work said that the issues were, however, being sorted out.
For rural areas, he said that the base data of beneficiaries has been taken from the Participatory Identification of Poor (PIP) exercise carried out in 2013-14. “On top of this, those who have AAY family cards but are not already in PIP list will be included,” he said.
Similarly for urban areas, the base list of beneficiaries is taken from a BPL identification exercise done in 2003-04, over which the AAY cardholders will be included, the official added. “However, the process is still evolving as the government is keen on not excluding any deserving beneficiaries,” he said.
