In a rare move, the government has flagged 262,000 of its own employees in ongoing checks of public distribution system (PDS) records for possible wrongful benefits in terms of subsidised foodgrains, a senior government official said.
PFMS is a government platform used to track and manage payments and other financial transactions under various government schemes and programmes. The exercise is now set to widen, with the Union government seeking personnel data from the defence services and the home ministry. This could bring two of the country’s largest government workforces into the cross-check. “These may or may not be wrongful. We have asked states to verify the names before removing anybody from the beneficiary list. Many states list government employment as grounds for excluding a household from the priority category under the National Food Security Act. In Bihar, one of the country’s largest and poorest states, households with a government employee are among those excluded from the PDS.
The state’s 2015 notification on this defines government service to include regular employment in the Centre and state governments, state-owned firms, local bodies and autonomous government institutions.
“Most state governments disqualify central/state government employees as an exclusion criterion under the scheme, which makes this so puzzling,” the official cited above added on condition of anonymity. To be sure, the official said that being flagged does not mean a beneficiary has been found to be ineligible. However, according to the official, “most government employees earn more than this threshold.”
