Worried over the slow rollout of its much-publicised Direct Benefits Transfer (DBT) scheme, the government is likely to call a meeting on Monday of all district collectors of the areas where the programme has started or is about to begin.
To be convened by the Planning Commission, it will discuss the major bottlenecks in implementation and the progress so far.
Launched on January 1, the first phase of DBT covered 43 districts and was expected to cover another 78 from April 1, in the second phase. Inadequate progress in the first phase led the government to push back the date for starting the second phase of DBT, to now begin from July 1, with the same 78 districts. Three pension schemes of the rural development ministry would also be included.
The DBT would also be extended to include the cooking gas subsidy in a phased manner, to cover 20 districts by May 15. In most cases, officials said the big problem has been seeding the Aadhaar numbers with bank accounts for direct transfer of cash. In the first phase, just around 35 million transactions were completed, transferring only Rs 45 crore to Aadhaar-seeded accounts. This translates into an average transfer of only Rs 1,285 for each account since January 1.
The government had estimated about 1.6 million beneficiaries would be covered under phase-I. Of these, about 1.3 million have been identified by banks but only 550,000 of them have reported their Aadhaar numbers.
A finance ministry official said the transactions worth Rs 45 crore done by banks in the past three and a half months were only towards Aadhaar-enabled accounts. The total amount transferred by central ministries to various beneficiaries was much higher.
