Buoyed with the success of the Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT), finance minister Arun Jaitley in the Budget speech announced to give statutory backing to Aadhaar seeding of schemes.
Buoyed with the success of the Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT), finance minister Arun Jaitley in the Budget speech announced to give statutory backing to Aadhaar seeding of schemes.
While speaking about reforms in the subsidy programmes, Mr Jaitley said: “Additionally, as I will elaborate later, we will undertake significant reform, including enactment of a law to ensure all government benefits are conferred to people who deserve it by giving a statutory backing to the Aadhaar platform. The statutory status will pave the way for expanding Aadhaar’s use for a range of developmental purposes.” Incidentally, the reform will entail that all benefits, subsidies or services funded from the consolidated fund of India, will be through Aadhaar platform. Till date, over 98 crore Aadhaar numbers have been generated. Per day average of 26 lakh biometric and over 1.5 lakh e-KYC transactions are made, the government sources said.
Buoyed by success of DBT in LPG, the government today announced direct transfer of fertiliser subsidy to farmers on pilot basis in few districts but reduced the overall subsidy allocation to the sector. In the budget 2016-17, the government pegged fertiliser subsidy at Rs 70,000 crore, lower than Rs 72,437.58 crore revised estimate for this financial year.
While tabling the Union Budget for 2016-17, MR Jaitely announced the direct benefit transfer on pilot basis for fertiliser. “We have already introduced a DBT in
LPG. Based on this successful experience, we proposed to introduce DBT on pilot basis for fertiliser in few districts in the country with a view to improving quality of service delivery to the farmers,” said Mr Jaiately.
The Department of Fertilisers (DoF) is working on a roadmap to capture the details of farmers so that the sales data can be captured and subsidy can be transferred into the accounts of the farmers directly, according to a Parliamentary Standing Committee report.
