Hyderabad: Nizamabad district has the highest number of beneficiaries for the Telangana state government’s single woman pension scheme that was formally launched across the state on Sunday, while Nirmal district has the least number.
All ministers, MPs, MLAs etc. distributed allotment letters to beneficiaries on Sunday extending Rs 1,000 per month pension for single women.
Since Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao announced implementation of scheme with retrospective effect from April 1 this year, beneficiaries were given Rs 2,000 pension each for April and May.
The amount will be directly credited into the bank accounts/post office accounts of beneficiaries by the 8th of every month. However, applications received for the scheme were much below the government’s expectations.
While the government expected 3.60 lakh applications as per the household survey conducted in August 2014, it received just 1.42 lakh applications, of which 1.08 lakh were found to be eligible after verification.
In Nizamabad, officials received around 11,730 applications, and after scrutiny they found 8,367 eligible.
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Minister Pocharam Srinivas Reddy, who formally launched the single woman pension scheme at Banswada and Nizamabad, said that Telangana was the only state in the country to give Rs 1,000 social security pension. Of one crore families in the state, around 50 per cent will be covered under different pension schemes, he said.
The government sanctioned Rs 4,000 crore for the scheme for this year but with fewer applications, the expenditure would not cross over Rs 1,500 crore.
Panchayat raj and rural development department has been appointed as the nodal agency for implementing the scheme.
“We extended the deadline thrice to enable more single women submit applications. We took up awareness programmes from the village-level to state-level seeking applications. Despite this, getting just over 1 lakh applications surprised us. We will take up the issue with CM and request him to give one more opportunity to submit applications, if there are any leftover beneficiaries,” said Jupally Krishna Rao, minister for panchayat raj.
