Chennai: Pointing out that the policy decision cannot be interfered with, the Madras high court has dismissed a Public Interest Litigation, challenging the Special Financial Assistance Scheme of Rs 2,000 each to 60 lakh BPL families, announced by the government.
A division bench comprising Justices S. Manikumar and Subramonium Prasad dismissed the PIL filed by Satta Panchayat Iyakkam represented by its trustee Senthil Arumugam alias Senthil Kumar.
The bench said on going through the report, it was of the view that there was no irregularity or arbitrariness, more so, policy decision to provide special financial help to victims of natural calamity cannot be interfered with.
Earlier, Senthil Arumugam, appearing as party-in-person, submitted that as per the announcement made by Chief Minister on February 11, 2019, there are 60 lakh who fall under BPL families. However, the data published clearly shows that the 60 lakh figure is an inflated one.
Under the public distribution system, there are nearly 2 crore ration cards in use. Keeping this fact in view, if we go by the 60 lakh BPL family data as announced in assembly, then there must be 30 percent families under BPL.
As per the Budget speech, total population under BPL in TN was only 11.28% only i.e 28.32 lakh only, he added.
Producing a report filed by the managing director of Tamil Nadu Corporation for Development of Women, advocate general Vijay Narayan submitted that poor families in rural and urban areas have been identified in Tamil Nadu over a period of time for implementation of various welfare programmes through participatory identification of poor under rural livelihood programmes, BPL survey list and labours registered under various welfare boards. Participatory Identification of Poor process was conducted in Tamil Nadu in 31 rural districts from the year 2006. Very poor and poor families were identified based on several criteria including the annual income.
Those who have less than 'Rs 24,000 annual income were ‘very poor’ and those who have income between Rs 24,000 and Rs 50,000 were poor. Thus, 32.13 lakh families have already been identified, he added.
Advocate general said in the urban areas, 23.54 lakh BPL households have been identified in 664 urban local bodies consisting of corporation, municipalities and town panchayats.
As per the report received from the labour welfare department, the workers in different occupations have registered themselves in 17 welfare boards. In these welfare boards 72.44 lakh persons have registered.
Apart from this, department of fisheries maintains the database of around 1.64 lakh poor fishermen families who were being assisted by the department.
The government proposed to provide this assistance to the families identified through rural PIP and urban BPL list and those labourers identified through various labour welfare boards, he added.
