Northeast Delhi: Banks blamed for tardy progress

“Pado mat, padao mat, sarkar bachao abhiyan chal raha hai (It’s a case of don’t study, don’t teach, focus on the government bailing out scheme),” says an exasperated official of the district’s school education department.

Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit has declared that Delhi will take the lead in the central government’s drive to directly wire all subsidies to the beneficiaries of Direct Benefits Transfer. DBT now covers two schemes: The Janani Suraksha Yojana for pregnant or lactating mothers and scholarship schemes for schoolgoers — post-matric for Scheduled Castes and backward community students, an incentive scholarship for girls and means-cum-merit payment.

In Delhi, the northeast was chosen in the first phase, and coverage would be only for a small part — 60 of its 127 schools and 2,060 students of the 300,000 in the district. (Of the 2.2 million people in the northeast, enrolment for the Aadhaar card has been completed for 1.2 million.

Only 450 women and 2,060 students are to be covered. But not a single transfer has been done so far.

Education department officials, school authorities, teachers and students are engaged in the project.

The banks say they will not transfer money till all those on the list of beneficiaries have Aadhaar numbers and bank accounts.

Till a week ago, according to the banks, hundreds of students didn’t have accounts and several more didn’t have Unique Identification Numbers.

R N Sharma, nodal officer for Unique Identification Number (UID) and education in the district, told Business Standard last week: “Almost 2,000 students have neither UIDs nor accounts. The card takes two or more months to come. Where UID is not there, we are making do with the receipts given by UID authorities.”

He says the delay is not so much on the part of the UID people as that of the banks.

The lenders deny this. “UID and account has to be there for the transfer to take place. UID receipts would not do. If it takes two months, then the process can start only after that,” says a senior official of State Bank of India.

The banks blame the schools for the state of affairs. “They don’t want to do the job,” says a senior SBI official of the education department people. “It is a one-time job of getting beneficiaries together and getting them to open accounts or getting them enrolled for UID. Children come to school every day. Why can’t the officials and the school principals get this done?”

Education department officials blame the banks. Account opening is a troublesome affair, says at least one school principal.