A record amount of nearly Rs 12.5 lakh crore was transferred to several beneficiaries through 1,300 crore transactions in the last two financial years under the Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT), which is nearly 44% of the cumulative DBT transfers since 2014.
Figures available with News18 show while nearly Rs 6.17 lakh crore was transferred to people in the last financial year that ended March 31, 2023, over Rs 6.3 lakh crore was transferred to people in the financial year 2021-22. This was a quantum jump from earlier financial years when Rs 3.82 lakh crore was sent to people under DBT in 2019-20 before the Covid-19 pandemic.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi singled out the DBT during his address to the CBI officers on Monday. “A Prime Minister had said if Re 1 goes to people, 15 paise reaches and 85 paise was stolen. Recently, I was thinking that we have sent about Rs 27 lakh crore to the people through DBT. If it was seen according to that, then out of 27 lakh crores, about 16 lakh crore would have gone somewhere,” PM Modi said.
The PM further said today, with the trinity of Jan Dhan, Aadhaar and Mobile, every beneficiary is getting his full entitlement. “Through this system, more than 8 crore fake beneficiaries have been out of the system. The daughter who was not born used to become a widow and widow pension used to run. Due to DBT, about Rs 2.25 lakh crore of the country have been saved from going into wrong hands,” the PM said at the CBI function on Monday.
Nearly 587 crore DBT transactions were carried out in the last financial year while 717 crore were made in 2021-22. India has cumulatively done DBT transfers worth nearly Rs 29 lakh crore since 2014 – 44% of which were in last two years.
Why the DBT jump?
The Centre has brought increasing number of schemes under the DBT to cut down on leakages and the money falling into wrong hands. In 2022-23, the Centre transferred Public Distribution System (PDS) ration worth Rs 1.63 lakh crore to poor people in the country and the figure stood at Rs 2.17 lakh crore for 2021-22. This was in a big way due to the free ration scheme ran by the Centre — PM Ann Yojana — during the Covid-19 pandemic.
In the last financial year, the biggest payout under DBT was for fertiliser subsidy, which rose from 1.23 lakh crore in 2021-22 to 2.06 lakh crore in 2022-23. Compared to this, the DBT payout under PDS in 2019-20 had stood at Rs 0.8 lakh crore and under fertilizer at Rs 0.46 lakh crore. At present, 310 Central government schemes fall under DBT’s ambit.
The government says it has saved nearly Rs 2.73 lakh crore through DBT by eliminating fake beneficiaries under various schemes.
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