Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Sunday said that reforms introduced by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led government had eliminated leakages in welfare delivery through Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT), asserting that every rupee allocated by the Centre now reaches beneficiaries directly.
Addressing a public gathering after launching the PM Family Care Tracker (PM-FCT) pilot project and Health Passports in Gandhinagar, HM Shah contrasted the present system with an earlier statement by a former Prime Minister regarding leakages in welfare spending.
"There was a time when the Prime Minister of the country admitted that if he sent one rupee from Delhi, only 15 paise reached the poor, while 85 paise disappeared in between," the Home Minister said. He said the introduction of the DBT had fundamentally changed the delivery of government assistance.
"Today, as the Union Home Minister and as a Member of Parliament, I can look everyone in the eye and say that when PM Modi sends one rupee, the entire one rupee is transferred directly into the poor person's bank account," he said. According to HM Shah, the DBT architecture had ushered in "a new era of welfare for the poor" by transferring benefits directly into bank accounts without intermediaries.
The Home Minister said he had personally witnessed the extent of poverty while travelling through eastern Uttar Pradesh before the change in government. "It is not that there is no poverty in Gujarat. But when I travelled to the Purvanchal region of Uttar Pradesh, I experienced what extreme poverty truly means," he said.
Describing those conditions, HM Shah said many families lacked houses, electricity, toilets, piped water and access to healthcare. "People had no homes. If there were no home, there could be no electricity. There were countless houses without toilets.
Even where there was a hut, there was no water supply inside," he said. He added that medical treatment was beyond the reach of many poor families, and mothers often had no option but to pray when children fell ill. HM Shah said the present welfare architecture ensured that benefits reached recipients directly without leakages.
"Today, if one rupee is sent from Delhi, the full 100 paise reaches the beneficiary's bank account," he said. The PM Family Care Tracker, launched on Sunday, is a digital platform that integrates multiple welfare databases to improve monitoring and delivery of health, nutrition, education and social welfare schemes for mothers and children.