JOIN USWhere did Direct Beneficiary Transfer money go?
Long-starved of gold medals in international games, our soccer and hockey teams could learn a thing or two from our bureaucracy which is quite aatmanirbhar in the art of blocking and tackling requests for even mundane information. For four months now, I have tried to seek public access to micro-level data about the monetary relief granted to 20.5 crore women under the PM Garib Kalyan Yojana (PMGKY), without any success. Babus lobbed the RTI application back and forth several times to dodge the responsibility of putting all information on a website within everybody’s reach. This data appears to be as closely guarded a ‘sarkari secret’ as the details of the Chinese intrusions in Ladakh.
In June this year, the Centre claimed that it had distributed a whopping Rs 20,300 crore to women, at the rate of Rs 500 per month for three months, to help them tide over the household financial crisis caused by the Covid-19 lockdown. At that time, the government acknowledged that less than 50% of them had withdrawn this money from their PM Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY) bank accounts.
My RTI application sent to the Finance Ministry sought not the beneficiaries’ names, but public
disclosure of state and district-wise data about withdrawals and the number of Jan Dhan accounts which had become inoperative, due to which the Covid-19 period direct benefit transfer (DBT) had failed.
A couple of other queries were related to the assistance that Bank Mitras provided to women for withdrawing these funds, including any doorstep
services offered.
In June, a gut-wrenching video of a 60-year-old woman in Naupara, Odisha, dragging a charpoy on which her 100-year-old mother lay, all the way to the bank, to convince its manager that she was alive, had gone viral. The RBI’s instructions that such elderly people and those with disabilities must be serviced at their homes must be lying in some dusty file which neither woman could have accessed.
In true bureaucratic style, the Department of Financial Services (DFS) shunted my RTI application to the Ministry of Rural Development (MoRD) within four days. They, in turn, threw it at the Department of Economic Affairs (DEA) the next day. DEA passed it back to, believe it or not, the DFS which lobbed it back again at MoRD — all actions taken at lightning speed, within 24 hours, thanks to the power of the government’s IT infrastructure. The impact of ‘Digital India’ was well demonstrated.
MoRD had little option left but to pass the buck internally as its extramural actions had scored a self-goal. The RTI application reached two public information officers (PIO) – one dealing with the implementation of the MGNREGA programme and the other responsible for implementing the National Social Assistance Programme (NSAP) under which widows, elderly persons and persons with disabilities are given monthly pensions. The first PIO washed her hands off as the information sought was not related to her mandate; the second replied that Rs 2,814.50 crore had been released in two instalments of Rs 500 each to 2.82 crore beneficiaries. This assistance, no doubt, is also part of the PMGKY package announced on March 26, but it is different from the DBT package meant for 20.5 crore PMJDY women.
MoRD’s First Appellate Authority upheld the PIO’s reply, ignoring my plea that he was not competent to provide answers to the RTI queries, instead they should have been sent back to the Finance Ministry as the PMJDY is its baby. To top it all, the artificially intelligent Online RTI filing facility, through which this entire game was played, refused to allow lodging of a first appeal against the Finance Ministry simply because they had chucked the RTI out of their office twice. Now, it is the turn of the Central Information Commission to umpire the correctness of all these actions. That is not likely to happen for at least another year, given their case-pendency which is inching towards the 36,000 mark. By then, the information will be obsolete.
On September 28, transparency advocates around the world will celebrate ‘International Right to Know Day’. Two weeks later, India’s RTI Act will enter its 16th year of implementation. Whether it will be ‘sweet 16’ or a rebellious teen for the Jan-Gan’s “Quest for Transparency,” highlighted on the PMO website, is not too difficult to guess.