Telangana government has set a target of halving the existing Food security and pension scheme beneficiaries. The government has cancelled all the existing ration and pension cards and even made an intensive household survey to weed out the fake beneficiaries. But the process is proving to be more headache for the government. It is said that the state has witnessed a flood of applications for Food Security and pension cards. The current number of pension beneficiaries is 31.67 lakh while the fresh applications received for pensions now stand at 37.94 lakh.
Similarly, there are 80 lakh white card holders at present and fresh applications received for Food Security Cards are 92.73 lakh. The government will now have a tough task filtering the bogus applications from those received. This also means that the door to door verification of the received applications will take more time than estimated now. KCR was supposed to launch the new pension scheme on November 8 which may not happen now. One more interesting finding in this whole episode is that according to the Telangana Survey, there are 1.01 Crore families in the state and 92 per cent of the total households have sought fresh ration cards and 30 per cent households for pensions.
