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1.69 lakh Haryana families lose BPL tag Sirsa, June 20 As Savitri tells the headmistress that being from a very poor background, she will not be able to refund the money, which is in thousands, Parul starts sobbing at her mother’s helplessness. The headmistress, who had sent a notice to Parul’s parents accusing them of committing forgery by siphoning of scholarship to which they were not entitled and had even threatened to lodge an FIR, starts calming down Parul. “Why do you weep beta? Your parents may be poor, but you are not. You have a caring mother and father to look after your needs,” the headmistress tries to comfort Parul. Over 50 families from Rania held a demonstration outside the mini-secretariat in Sirsa and submitted a memorandum to Additional Deputy Commissioner Shiv Prashad Sharma that their financial position did not allow them to return the money that the authorities were demanding as refund of benefits they had enjoyed due to their BPL status over the past five years. Scenes like this are being witnessed in every village and town in Haryana, as the authorities have started recovery of benefits received by nearly 1.69 lakh families in the state. These families were on the BPL list earlier, but have lost that status now. “The authorities are merely complying with the orders of the Punjab and Haryana High Court,” said Fatehabad Additional Deputy Commissioner Rajiv Rattan. Over 13,000 families from Fatehabad-7,700 from rural areas and 5,800 from urban areas-were deleted from the BPL list following a survey.
In Sirsa, around 79,000 families are enjoying the BPL status at present. In all, 5,486 families, including 2,077 urban and 3,409 rural ones, have been divested of the BPL status and told to refund the benefits they had drawn in the past. Interestingly, people like Savitri, though declared ineligible to continue with their BPL status, are not necessarily rich. “But the norms for the BPL list are such that if we strictly go by the rules, not even a single family will remain on the BPL list in Haryana,” said an officer associated with the process. “As per survey norms, a family having four marla house gets three point, the one owning a television set gets two points, the family that has a matriculate member gets two points, the family whose any members has a lowly paid employment as driver in a private vehicle gets three points and so on. The family that crosses five points, loses its BPL status. It means, if a family with BPL status decides to purchase an old TV set for Rs 500, it will do so at the cost of its BPL card,” the officer explained. The benefits given to the BPL cardholders include subsidised ration, scholarship for schoolchildren, free health treatment under the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojna (RSBY) and grants under several other welfare schemes. In “Pradeep Kumar and others Verses State of Haryana and others, OP Sheoran, the then Director General of Rural Development Department, Haryana, replied through an affidavit that 1,68,676 BPL cardholders in Haryana had been found ineligible for the BPL status. In its order, the high court ordered the government to cancel these cards after affording the family an opportunity of hearing and recover the benefits availed by them since 2007. The court ordered registration of criminal cases against those who had provided wrong information for getting BPL cards, recover the amount purported to have been paid to non-existent persons from the official responsible for it and lodged cases against them, withdraw employments given to such BPL cardholders due to their status and fix liability in cases of issuance of wrong BPL cards. Hundreds of families have been visiting mini-secretariats throughout the state with notices issued to them in their hands expressing helplessness, only to listen from the authorities that they are helpless, too.
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