Bihar govt to link schemes with Aadhaar to avail benefits

Patna: The Bihar government on Tuesday announced in the state legislative Assembly that government's schemes will be linked with Aadhaar card in order to avail the benefits of the schemes.

"It is the government's resolve to link schemes like scholarships, public distribution system, MGNREGA and Indira Awas Yojana with Aadhaar. It will bring transparency," Rural Development Department minister Shravan Kumar said.

Kumar was replying to a debate on Rural Development Department's budgetary demand of Rs 5,510.06 crore for FY'2016-17.

Out of Bihar's 10.40 crore total population, 6.63 crore have been registered under Aadhaar scheme, he said.

Advocating for a uniform wage under MGNREGA scheme, Kumar said the state government pays Rs 177 as minimum wage to a labourer, whereas the Centre gives Rs 162 for this. The state government was giving an additional Rs 15 to the labourers from its coffers.

The minister said he has requested the Centre to revise the minimum wage under MGNREGA to Rs 189.

As per the Socio-Economic Caste Census (SECC) data, there were around 90 lakh people who were homeless, Kumar said while questioning the Centre's ambitious move to provide housing for all by 2022.

The Centre's target to provide housing to all does not match with the allotment made to Bihar, Kumar said adding the Government would either have to increase its allotment to Bihar for housing scheme or it would have to extend its time-frame.

The target under Indira Awas Yojana (IAY) has witnessed a steady decline ever since the NDA came to power at the Centre, the minister said. Citing figures of allotment under IAY scheme, he said 6.86 lakh houses have to be built in IAY in 2012-13, while it declined to 5.52 lakh in 2013-14, 2.96 lakh in 2014-15 and 2.31 lakh in 2015-16.

The allotment for first two years was of UPA regime, while the last two years were of NDA regime, he said adding Rs 2534.81 crore of IAY between 2011-12 to 2015-16 was still pending with the Centre.

The minister informed the House that 77 new Block-cum-Circle office cum residential cum inspection bungalow would be built, besides 101 Information Technology Bhawan would be constructed at a cost of Rs 935.47 crore.

The minister said 4.60 lakh Self Help Groups (SHG) have been formed and the figure was expected to touch five lakh by the end of March 2016 and government aims at taking this figure to ten lakh by the end of 2017-18 fiscal.

With this, the government aims to connect 1.5 crore poor families, specially women. The idea was to make poor women self dependent so that they carry out their small works by taking a loan from SHG at two per cent rate of interest, the minister added.