Mumbai: Months after restoring a pension scheme for individuals who had been jailed throughout the Emergency, the Eknath Shinde-led Maharashtra authorities has determined to pay arrears to the beneficiaries to compensate for the length when it was scrapped by the earlier authorities.
The state authorities, comprising the Bharatiya Janata Get together (BJP) and Shinde’s Balasahebanchi Shiv Sena, has put aside Rs 61.22 crore as arrears for 3,339 beneficiaries of the scheme, in response to a 21 October authorities decision that ThePrint has seen. The arrears are for the interval from 1 August 2020 to 31 July 2022.
The earlier Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) authorities — which comprised the Shiv Sena, the Congress, and the Nationalist Congress Get together (NCP) — had scrapped the scheme in July 2020 citing fiscal burden throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. The Shinde-led authorities introduced it again in July this 12 months, inside a month of coming to energy.
A state authorities official who didn’t want to be named, mentioned, “The present authorities was of the opinion that it could solely be honest that the beneficiaries who had been permitted below the scheme as per the 2018 determination ought to get an uninterrupted pension. When the federal government determined to revive the scheme, we additionally mentioned that we might grant arrears for the interval for which the scheme was scrapped.”
“However we needed to do some groundwork to reach on the precise variety of beneficiaries and the quantity. We collected information from district collectors for a similar,” he advised ThePrint.
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The pension scheme
The scheme of awarding pension to these jailed throughout the 1975-1977 Emergency interval was first launched in 2018 when BJP’s Devendra Fadnavis was the chief minister, following within the footsteps of many different BJP governments on the time.
Below it, those that spent greater than a month behind bars get a pension of Rs 10,000 per thirty days. In case of the loss of life of such individuals, their partner will get a pension of Rs 5,000 a month.
Equally, those that spent lower than a month are entitled a month-to-month pension of Rs 5,000, whereas their subsequent of kin, within the occasion of their loss of life, get a pension of Rs 2,500.
One in every of many reversed selections
The present authorities has reversed over half a dozen selections of the earlier Uddhav Thackeray-led authorities, together with the one on the pension scheme.
One of many Shinde authorities’s first selections was to revert to the contentious plan to construct a Metro automobile depot at Mumbai’s Aarey Colony, which Thackeray as chief minister had relocated to Kanjurmarg in October 2020.
Final week, the Shinde-Fadnavis authorities additionally restored the final consent to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to conduct probes in Maharashtra. The MVA authorities had scrapped the final consent throughout their tug of warfare with the BJP over the probe into actor Sushant Singh Rajput’s loss of life.
The present authorities has additionally determined to carry again just a few different selections by the sooner Fadnavis-led authorities that the MVA authorities had scrapped — direct election of sarpanches and presidents of municipal councils, voting rights to farmers in Agriculture Produce Advertising and marketing Committee polls, and Fadnavis’ pet venture, the Jalyukt Shivar scheme, aimed toward growing the soil moisture content material.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)
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