In hundreds of villages across Bengal, protests have erupted over allegations of exclusion of names of beneficiaries in Banglar Awas Yojana.
Kolkata: More than a year after the Central government halted the release of Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana-Gramin (PMAY-G) funds to West Bengal due to widespread irregularities, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s attempt to spin the narrative for political gain has opened a can of worms, with reports of widespread wrongdoing by her officials and party members spilling out.
In hundreds of villages across Bengal, protests have erupted over allegations of exclusion of names of beneficiaries in Banglar Awas Yojana. Protesting villagers gathered outside the offices of Block Development Officers (BDO) in different districts and alleged that their names as beneficiaries have been excluded at the behest of the local Trinamool Congress leadership. Protests have erupted in almost all districts like Purulia, Birbhum, Paschim Medinipur as well as South 24 Parganas, where the Trinamool Congress commands total control over the rural administration.
Before the general elections, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee had announced with much fanfare that rather than “beg the Centre for funds” she would start the Bangla Awas Yojana with state funds.
Having gained electoral mileage, she announced that the state government would start the process from September with her own officials “verifying the list of eligible people that had been sent to the Centre”. Under the Bangla Awas Yojana (BAY) scheme of the state, Rs 1.2 lakh is allocated to each beneficiary in three instalments. The first tranche of funds would be distributed to “eligible beneficiaries” by end-December, she said.
As her officials made the rounds, the surveys revealed widespread irregularities. In cases running to lakhs, the officials found that deserving poor families in the state were kept out of the list of beneficiaries while Trinamool functionaries included their own names and those of their family members in the lists. The allegation—denied by the Trinamool—was that across the state, Central funds allocated for this scheme had been siphoned off by Trinamool functionaries in collusion with state government officers.
For example, on Thursday, following the submission of a report by the state revealing that PM Awas Yojana funds in case of five beneficiaries under a Panchayat in Canning-I Block went to wrong bank accounts, the Calcutta High Court, calling it a deliberate and wilful fraud, directed the state to consider criminal proceedings while directing the bank to furnish details of the accounts where the money was transferred to.
Advocate Sudipta Dasgupta, who appeared for the petitioners, told The Sunday Guardian: “The petitioners alleged that some of the Panchayat members along with the Panchayat Pradhan used their administrative position and pressurised the Panchayat workers into changing the bank account numbers of the petitioners to bank account numbers of some of the accomplice of the Pradhan.”
The BDOs at various places where the protests had come to fore, assured the people that there was no new survey for allocating houses for the rural poor and they will look into allegations of names of beneficiaries being excluded.
Amidst the protests, a notification was issued by the West Bengal government on Wednesday suggesting that fresh verification will be made to look into the names of beneficiaries who have been excluded.
Sources in the West Bengal government said that Mamata Banerjee, during a meeting with senior ministers of her Cabinet earlier this week, had instructed that guidelines for providing houses for the rural poor that have been laid down by the Centre, can be relaxed for the interest of the beneficiaries.
The Chief Minister’s chief adviser, Alapan Bandyopadhyay, in a bid to douse the flames, said that Banerjee had instructed that authorities should be “humane in deciding the list of beneficiaries”.
However, this has opened a can of worms with instances of wrongdoing coming to light in droves.
In the Jagadanandapur gram panchayat in Purba Bardhaman district, locals reviewed the latest list for Awas Yojana and discovered that a fictitious “Sudeshna Roy” was listed as a beneficiary six times. Her name appears from serial numbers 380 to 385, registered across three different villages: Musthuli, Amdanga and Jagadanandapur. Shockingly, no such person exists, suggesting that at least Rs 7.2 lakh could have been allocated to a non-existent beneficiary, multiple times over.
“This is just one instance,” says BJP state secretary Jagannath Chattopadhyay. “Across the state, there will be lakhs of Sudeshna Roys. This proves how the funds allotted by the Narendra Modi government were being misused by Trinamool leaders with the help of the administration. The anomaly is not limited to Jagadanandapur. Such malpractices are widespread in gram panchayats across the state,” he alleged.
He added that in Bangla Awas Yojana, the state government surveyed 18.3 lakh households, from which 22.7% were rejected. “This high rate of rejection shows how many false applications were filed. This is exactly what the Central teams said about PMAY,” Chattopadhyay said.
Chattopadhyay has written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, seeking an Enforcement Directorate probe into Bengal’s funds utilisation under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana up to 2022.
While angry villagers are laying siege at the BDO offices alleging exclusion, a section of Trinamool Congress functionaries are blaming party leaders for the omissions. People who have pucca houses or have availed the benefit of the scheme in the past are excluded from the list. The issue has provided a handle to the Opposition parties to target the ruling party.
Trinamool’s former Rajya Sabha MP Kunal Ghosh said there could be “technical errors” in some places but the allegations were politically motivated. “The Centre stopped funding for the housing scheme. The state intervened only after that and the CM announced the creation of 11 lakh households. It is being funded entirely by the state government. Checks and cross-checks are going on. BJP initially tried to stop work by not releasing funds. Now, when it has backfired on them, they are trying to pick up stray cases and make an issue out of those,” Ghosh said.
“The money has not been disbursed to any fictitious name so far. The state started the survey to ensure no ineligible or unauthorised applicants benefit from the scheme,” a senior IAS officer said.
While BJP leaders said the housing scheme in the state was riddled with corruption, the Trinamool Congress claimed the Bengal government had started its own scheme with its own funds.
“It is not merely the Opposition but Trinamool workers have been alleging anomalies in the housing scheme. The Central government stopped funds in some schemes only after widespread corruption was detected,” Bengal BJP spokesperson Samik Bhattacharya said.
Reports also appeared in many newspapers and TV channels of well-to-do Trinamool functionaries and their relatives availing the benefits of the housing scheme while the poor had been left out.
Reports also reveal that local Trinamool Congress leaders are ensuring that otherwise eligible people who did not vote for the party are excluded from the list of beneficiaries.
In 2022, similar allegations surfaced against local leaders of the ruling party. As protests gathered momentum in 2022, several instances came to the fore where family members of local Trinamool Congress were found to be beneficiaries of the scheme. The Chief Minister had assured that disciplinary action will be taken against leaders involved in such corruption.
In 2022, after receiving complaints from BJP MPs and MLAs as well as many others in Bengal, the Union Rural Development Ministry had deputed two Central teams to carry out checks on the implementation of PMAY-G in Purba Medinipur and Malda districts.
National-Level Monitoring (NLM) teams were also deputed to visit ten districts—Purba Medinipur, Paschim Medinipur, Purba Bardhaman, Malda, South 24 Parganas, Alipurduar, Nadia, Murshidabad, Kalimpong and Darjeeling—to probe complaints received from various sources on the implementation of PMAY-G in Bengal.
The findings of the Central teams and the NLM teams were shared with the Bengal government through a letter written by the Secretary of the Ministry of Rural Development, Shailesh Kumar Singh, to the then Bengal Chief Secretary Hari Krishna Dwivedi on February 27, 2023.
Singh, in the letter to the Bengal Chief Secretary, said that the allegations about anomalies in the implementation of PMAY-G “were found to be true/partially true in seven of the ten districts visited by the NLM teams”.
“The teams have observed that there are lapses in implementation of PMAY-G in the state of West Bengal and ineligible households have been included in the list and eligible households have been deleted due to wrong entries.”
The Union Rural Development Secretary, while recommending “corrective action”, expressly asked the Bengal government to “lodge FIRs against persons responsible for fraudulent acts”, take action against “erring block development officers (BDOs) and other supervisors”.
The Union Rural Development Ministry Secretary also directed that show-cause notices be served on senior district and other officials who fail to take action or delay action against the BDOs and other erring officials.
The Bengal government was also asked to “publicise widely” the action taken against persons and officials.
Singh’s letter to the Bengal Chief Secretary ended with: “I would like to request you to intervene personally in the matter and direct the officials concerned to take necessary action and submit the Action Taken Report (ATR) to the Ministry at the earliest and latest by 10 March, 2023.”
However, the state government has ignored each and every word of the directive.