The ministry assessed such a huge leakage after it started encountering large number of cases wherein false claimants were walking away with the allowances supposedly allocated for senior citizens, disabled and other groups.[break]
“It is difficult to quantify the volume, but we believe as much as 20 percent of the total budget allocated for running social security schemes is going off target,” said a source at MoLD. The government has allocated Rs 8.94 billion for the current fiscal year to run different social security schemes, like senior citizens, disabled, endangered ethnicity and single women allowances.
Sources said that the leakage was recorded in the form of registration of fake beneficiary, lack of updating of the beneficiary lists and also, in some cases, non-payment of allowances to the beneficiaries.
“The leakage is recorded largely due to dishonest VDC officials, village folks and family members,” said the source. It is rampant in Tarai districts, particularly hit by Madheshi movement, than hills.
The startling fact on the leakage came into light only after MoLD initiated consultations with different stakeholders to devise measures to plug the leakage.
Under the remedy measures worked out so far, MoLD will soon instruct local body to regularly update the list of beneficiaries.
It is also mulling over convincing beneficiaries to open bank accounts, so that allowances could be directly transferred into their accounts. “We believe this will not just help control the leakage, but also relieve beneficiaries greatly as they will be able to get the due allowances from the bank at their convenience,” said the source.
Presently, beneficiaries are required to repeatedly travel to VDCs in case of absence of officials there, queue up braving the scorching heat and appease the local body staff to get the state-pledged allowance.
As a part of this exercise, MoLD is soon launching a pilot program, under which it will arrange people of five municipalities and VDCs to open bank accounts and transfer their allowances in them. Nepal Rastra Bank (NRB) has already assigned Rastriya Banijya Bank and Nepal Bank Limited to carry out this service.
“By next year fiscal year, beneficiaries in all municipalities and VDCs close to district headquarters will get the allowances through their own bank accounts,” said Basudev Adhikari, NRB director.
If the MoLD managed to get this plan implemented, it will have 40 percent of the beneficiary in the banking net.
As for the other parts of the country, MoLD and NRB has converged to work out all possible alternatives to get the direct payment system implemented.
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