Karnataka's implementation and management of the direct benefit transfer (DBT) system have been poor and 22 departments transferred benefits of ₹2,829.02 crore under 168 schemes outside the core DBT portal, said the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India in its report.
The CAG report on DBT, which was tabled in the Legislative Assembly on Wednesday, noted, “The poor progress resulted in disbursements of benefits outside the DBT portal during 2018–20”.
It noted that the slow progress in onboarding the schemes by the user departments was due to lack of ICT applications and digitisation of the beneficiaries' data.
The DBT Cell did not have the information on the number of schemes which were required to be identified for onboarding; and availability of the ICT infrastructure in the departments for the identified schemes.
The DBT Cell did not have the information on the status of beneficiary database digitisation and seeding of the beneficiary data with validated Aadhaar number that are necessary for onboarding, the report said.
Lack of IT skills
The government in December 2021 stated that the delay in the onboarding of the schemes was due to the non-availability of IT systems in many of the departments. It further said the user departments could not develop their own IT system due to lack of IT skills.
The fact is that the Operations and Technical Groups of the DBT Cell failed to handhold the departments for timely onboarding of the schemes onto the DBT portal.
Order in 2018
The State government ordered in August 2018 the establishment of an integrated DBT platform for all departments.
As of April 2021, 83 out of 239 schemes (35%) implemented by 15 departments were onboarded onto the core DBT portal. Further, 83% of the overall transactions done through DBT were successful, and 14% of the transactions were rejected.
Beneficiaries deprived
Failure to initiate action for payment resulted in 6.67 lakh beneficiaries being deprived of financial benefits of ₹153.3 crore during 2018-19 and 2019-2020, the report said.
It was observed that in 2,499 cases, a sum of ₹ 30.59 lakh was credited to persons other than the actual beneficiary under the milk incentive scheme. Payments of ₹5.94 crore were not routed through core DBT portal in respect of the National Food Security Mission.
Under the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi scheme, the DBT payments of ₹ 91.99 crore were pending from 2019-20, resulting in depriving the beneficiaries of the benefits.
The departments implementing the schemes under the DBT failed to rectify and reinitiate the failed transactions, the CAG noted.
