Centre plans to bring all its scheme benefits payment under DBT

To bring transparency in delivery of centrally sponsored welfare schemes, and to eliminate data duplication and fake beneficiaries, the Centre asked its ministries to work towards bringing all welfare schemes under the ambit of Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT).

The Cabinet Secretariat issued an office memorandum asking all ministries to review all welfare schemes implemented by them. “Ministries/Departments are requested to comprehensively review all their schemes, both cash and in-kind, and thereafter on-board the newly identified schemes on the DBT portal,” the order said.

The Aadhaar-based DBT was started in January 2013 to make the government's welfare delivery system simpler, with quicker fund flow to intended beneficiaries.

Union home and co-operative minister Amit Shah had recently said that currently 52 ministries and 300 government schemes use DBT to send money directly to the beneficiaries. Soon, the government would permit co-operative banks to implement government schemes using DBT.

In 2020-21 alone, 98 crore people received central government scheme benefits in cash, while 81.9 beneficiaries got the schemes’ rewards in kind through the DBT.

Last week, while addressing a Digital India week event, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that, in the past eight years, about Rs 23 lakh crore had been transferred to the beneficiaries of the various central government schemes using digital payment modes through DBTs. This, Modi said, saved the country about Rs 2.3 lakh crore from going into the wrong hands.