New Delhi: West Bengal’s new BJP government will not, "for the time being", provide benefits under its Annapurna Bhandar scheme to those women whose appeals against their exclusion from the voter rolls following the contentious special intensive revision (SIR) are pending, minister Agnimitra Paul said.
Paul, who has taken charge as minister of women and children’s development, told reporters on Monday (May 11) that the government has decided that those who were struck off the voter rolls during the SIR will not receive benefits under Annapurna Bhandar, under which the BJP has promised to give eligible women Rs 3,000 per month.
This is so that "those who have died" and "those who are not citizens of this country" should not receive these benefits, Paul said, adding that chief minister Suvendu Adhikari had decided that women who have applied for Indian citizenship through the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) "and those whose names are pending before tribunals … too will be left out for the time being".
Under the Bengal SIR the Election Commission (EC) removed some 91 lakh names from the state’s voter rolls. The inclusion of over 27 lakh people among those who were flagged for so-called 'logical discrepancies' remained undecided when the state went to polls anyway on April 23 and 29.
Around 34 lakh appeals were filed with 19 appellate tribunals set up in the state - against exclusions as well as inclusions in the voter rolls - but these bodies cleared a mere 1,607 names for addition to the list just before polling took place.
The Bengal government’s decision to exclude women with appeals pending would mean that some people who qualify to receive benefits under the scheme will not get them because the tribunals ran out of time to adjudicate on their cases before the state’s voter rolls were frozen.
Prior to the election the BJP had championed the SIR as a means to remove, among others, 'illegal Bangladeshis' from the voter rolls. Paul in her remarks to the press echoed this sentiment when she said "those who are not citizens of this country" must not receive payouts under Annapurna Bhandar, but it is still not clear exactly how many foreign nationals the revision exercise has swept up.
Those whose applications for Indian citizenship under the CAA will also not receive the scheme’s benefits "for the time being". The government has not said how many people have received citizenship under the Act but Bangaon MP Shantanu Thakur had told The Wire earlier this year that 76,000 people had applied in the preceding seven months and that roughly 1,500 were successful.
Annapurna Bhandar is the BJP’s proposed successor to the Trinamool Congress’s Lakshmir Bhandar scheme, under which general category eligible women were given Rs 1,500 a month and SC and ST women were given Rs 1,700.
Payouts under the scheme are to begin via direct benefit transfer on June 1.