Ineligible people latch on to benefits

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: It has been found that thousands of ineligible individuals in the capital city have cornered benefits that should have gone to poor slum dwellers in the capital under the Basic Services to the Urban Poor (BSUP) project.

There are 355 slums in Thiruvananthapuram and the project had identified 13,187 beneficiaries.

Audits conducted by the Comptroller and Auditor General and the local fund audit have found that the corporation did not provide benefits to all the beneficiaries included in the approved detailed project reports, and provided assistance to new beneficiaries by deleting most of the beneficiaries in the approved list even without obtaining the approval of state level steering committee and central sanctioning and ,onitoring committee.

Test-check of the files of the 740 beneficiaries who received the assistance under the scheme showed that only 55 of them were from the approved beneficiary list.

Out of the 565 flats constructed in Thiruvananthapuram, 368 flats at a cost of Rs 17.19 crore had not been allotted to the beneficiaries as the beneficiary list kept changing.

The CAG noted that there was clear lack of transparency in the distribution of benefits. As per Scheme guidelines, biometric mapping of the identified beneficiaries has to be conducted and names placed on the website of local bodies. This was not done.

The BSUP scheme has laid down that flats should be allotted to those who did not possess land or building. Thiruvananthapuram Corporation allotted 175 flats in two slum colonies, namely, Kannamoola Bund Colony and Karimadam Colony. Allotment of all these flats was done without obtaining non-possession certificates from the village officer.

The files of these beneficiaries did not even contain any indication about any kind of verification conducted by the corporation.

The CAG has noted that the process of selection of beneficiaries without obtaining non-possession certificates or the conduct of spot verification by the corporation not only results in the violation of the selection procedure but also fraught with the risk of the inclusion of ineligible beneficiaries.