Hyderabad, December 21: As many as 32,000 pensioners might not get their pensions from next month as they failed to submit the ration card details, which are needed to weed out the duplicate pension cards.
Hyderabad district officials said the decision was taken following the identification of 2,000 people having multiple pension cards. Which means the identified people have been suspected of drawing multiple pensions using various cards. Hyderabad Collector Navin Mittal told ‘Expresso’ that orders were issued to identify whether money was drawn multiple times. “It was done intentionally and we will recover the money if people are found to have drawn pensions using different cards,” Navin Mittal said.
As part of the effort to weed out duplicate pensioner cards, the district officials have taken a drive to verify the details of all the 97,000 pensioners. The verification will be done based on the ration card details, considering that each family should have only one ration card.
The collected ration card details will be cross verified with the details of the pensioners. But till now only nearly 60,000 people submitted their ration card details. “Since the remaining 32,000 people did not submit the ration card details, we have decided not to give them their January pension,” Navin Mittal added.
In case of the 60,000 people who have already submitted the details it was found that the details of 5,000 pensioners were not tallying. Officials said the mismatch could also be because of the discrepancy while furnishing the data to the concerned Department. “The discrepancy could be because of the Government officials or the pensioner. The cases of discrepancies are different from the 2,000 people who are found having multiple cards. So until we get clarification from the 5,000 people, we will not issue pension to them also,” Navin Mittal said.
The district officials have decided to take up an integrated door to door survey, to weed out duplicate ration cards and pension cards. Using the Iris of all the ration card holders, already Civil Supplies Department identified people who have multiple cards. Using this information, officials will do door-to-door verification, to collect the extra cards besides verifying the pensioner cards. Since the last few months officials have decided to disband issuing pension if a beneficiary fails to withdraw three consecutive pensions. As per the Government decision’s, widows and aged people are eligible to get Rs 200 per month whereas differently-abled people will get Rs 500 per month.
—Agencies