Haryana govt using technology to curb corruption: Chief minister ML Khattar

Haryana Chief Minister M L Khattar on Thursday asserted that his government has zero tolerance towards corruption and is using technology to curb the menace.

"Our target is to set the systems right. We want to minimise human interference and have a faceless system with more use of technology," he said.

Khattar said his government has laid a lot of stress on digitalisation, which will also help in curbing corruption.

"We are working with zero tolerance towards corruption. We are making dedicated efforts to take the drive against corruption to the grassroots level," he told reporters here.

He said his government has undertaken several reforms to ensure 'maximum governance- minimum government'.

Responding to a query over the opposition recently questioning whether his "good governance associates" were from the RSS background, Khattar said, "They can be of any background."

He then added, "RSS is not a banned organisation. I belong to RSS myself. When I can become chief minister, cannot anyone from RSS background be my advisor... But we have not kept any such parameter -- whether one belongs to RSS or not (referring to his good governance associates). But being of RSS background is not banned."

When asked if his good governance associates are actually from the RSS background, Khattar replied, "I don't know, I never asked that."

He also said that these associates do not draw their salaries from the government exchequer.

He rejected as baseless the opposition's claim that the government discontinued the old-age pension of about 2.70 lakh beneficiaries in the state.

"The opposition will never share the details about the number of new pension beneficiaries added in the last two years...as many as 2.61 lakh new beneficiaries have been added in two years till March 2022, he said.

The chief minister said that around 2.41 lakh people have died in these two years, therefore their pension has been discontinued.

Besides this, there are about 21,000 having an annual income of more than Rs 3.50 lakh, therefore their pension has been discontinued, while there are around 15,000 cases where discrepancies related to age have been found, he added.

Khattar said through the family ID initiative, Parivar Pehchan Patra, it was found that there are almost 18,000 widows who later re-married and therefore their widow pension was not continued.

The chief minister said that in order to ensure complete transparency in maintaining records, the birth and death registration process has been digitised and it has been linked with the Parivar Pehchan Patra so that the information of the family members is updated automatically.