Agartala, July 1 (IANS) Aadhaar numbers, the unique 12-digit identification numbers given to residents of India, will soon be used to provide pensions, wages to workers and scholarships to students in 50 districts of the country, union Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh said here.
“The Aadhaar-enabled applications would soon be enforced first in the selected 50 districts of the country, where over 70 percent residents enrolled their names in the scheme,” Ramesh told reporters here Saturday night.
He said: “Aadhaar linked payments would be made first in providing wages to workers of MGNREGS (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme), all types of pensions and scholarships to students. Subsequently, the Aadhaar facilitated payments would be extended in banking and other sectors.”
The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has already enrolled 20 crore people and is working to register 40 crore more in the next 18 months.
According to UIDAI, of the 50 selected districts where the Aadhaar enabled applications would be launched soon, four districts are in Tripura and two in Sikkim in the northeastern region.
Quoting UIDAI, the minister said that Tripura leads the country by enrolling 90 percent of its 3.7 million population in the Aadhaar scheme, followed by Delhi with 75 percent.
Rejecting the demand for providing jobs for 200 days in a year to a household under the Mahatma Gandhi rural job scheme, Ramesh said that on an average eight to ten percent households in the country have been getting 100 days’ work in the scheme, so it was pointless to make such demands.
“Only in the Congress-ruled northeastern state of Manipur 30 percent job card holders under the MGNREGS get 100 days of work,” the minister added.
The Left-ruled Tripura continues to be the leading state in the country in terms of average employment under the rural employment guarantee scheme, with the state providing 72.39 days’ work to a household in the last 2011-12 fiscal.
“Tripura retained the top position since the 2009-10 fiscal in terms of person-days generation in the 2011-2012 financial year, followed by Andhra Pradesh (48.70 person-days) and Sikkim (47.43),” said Tripura Rural Development Minister Jitendra Chaudhury.
The union rural development minister said that the central government has adopted the policy of “hisab do, paisa lo (give accounts of funds and take the money).”
“The government had asked the CAG (Comptroller and Auditor General of India) to do a performance audit of the last five years in all the rural development schemes and released funds. The audit would end in November this year and the outcome of the performance assessment of CAG would be tabled in parliament in December,” Ramesh added.
He said that the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government has provided unprecedented amount of funds to the state governments, but they do not submit utilisation certificate and audited accounts of the central funds on time.
“During the current fiscal (2012-13), the rural development ministry has been providing Rs.99,000 crore to the state governments across the country. We would not allow the rural development funds to be diverted for other purposes,” he added.
“The money belongs to people of the county and they have the right to ask what they had got from the governments. Transparency, accountability and integrity must be followed both by the central and state governments,” he added.
The central minister, who came here Saturday, held regional meetings of the National Rural Drinking Water Programme and Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan (NBA) with officials of all the eight northeastern states.