Telangana government in a fix as number of applicants overshoots for food cards, pensions

Hyderabad: The Telangana government is in a tight spot given the flood of applications for food security cards and pensions.

While the aim of the government in inviting fresh applications was to halve the number of beneficiaries, the number of fresh applications has surpassed the existing beneficiaries.

The current number of pension beneficiaries is 31.67 lakh. However, the fresh applications received for pensions now stand at 37.94 lakh.

Similarly, there are 80 lakh white card holders at present and fresh applications received are 92.73 lakh.

Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao, who had been claiming that half of the existing beneficiaries were bogus, is surprised at the fresh applications surpassing the existing beneficiaries.

The plan of the government to discourage people from applying for fresh cards by conducting the intensive household survey and issuing statements that the government had each and every detail of all households has clearly failed to create an impact.

The Telangana government has now pinned its hopes on door-to-door verification of the applicants to filter out bogus beneficiaries for food security cards and pensions.

This, however, means that it will miss the deadlines for distribution of new food security cards and pensions once again.

Mr Rao was supposed to launch the new pension scheme on November 8.

However, officials have now informed him that it will not be possible to identify the eligible beneficiaries by then as they need to take up door-to-door verification of lakhs of households.

District collectors have also brought to the notice of the government that it will take at least two months to complete the verification process and the list of eligible beneficiaries can be expected only by mid-January.

Officials have been able to complete verification of only 20 per cent applications for pensions and just 10 per cent for food security cards till date.

As per the recent household survey, the total number of households in the state stands at 1.01 crore.

What has surprised the government is the fact that 92 per cent of the total households have sought fresh ration cards and 30 per cent households for pensions.