STAFF REPORTER
GUWAHATI: If May is significant for job seekers with thousands in line to get appointment letters, May-end or June is significant for the poor when around six lakh of them will make it to the Orunodoi scheme.
According to sources in the Finance Department, the government critically verified the beneficiaries of Orunodoi door to door. After deleting the names of a few lakh ineligible beneficiaries, the government trimmed the list to around 17 lakh. The government then launched Orunodoi 2.0 and decided to raise the number of beneficiaries up to 27 lakh in phases. The government has already distributed forms for the inclusion of more Orunodoi beneficiaries. Before the Bohag Bihu, the government included 2.02 lakh beneficiaries after verification. The new beneficiaries got Rs 1,250 on April 10 through DBT.
According to sources in the Finance Department, the district-level monitoring committees have approved around six lakh new beneficiaries after a thorough review of their forms. The government agents are now collecting affidavits from these beneficiaries stating that they are not government employees and that they fulfil other criteria for Orunodoi. The government bears the cost of the affidavits. After receiving the affidavits, the government will include them in the Orunodoi database by May-end or June. The inclusion of these six lakh will raise the number of Orunodoi beneficiaries to 25 lakh.
According to sources, the Orunodoi 2.0 has discretionary quotas: one at the district level and the other at the state level, to include any left-out poor in the Orunodoi database. The discretionary quotas have around 60,000 slots.
The government launched the Orunodoi scheme before the 2021 Assembly election. It is a women-centric highest-ever state-run scheme in the DBT mode to alleviate poverty. Originally, each beneficiary got Rs 830 per month, and after two revisions, it is now Rs 1,250 per month. The government spends around Rs 4,000 crore annually on this scheme.
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