25 out of 32 pensioners are ineligible for Pension !

[karira]

25 out of 32 pensioners are ineligible for Pension !

Came across this strange fact in a CIC order, so just wanted to share with the forum.

25 out of 32 old age pensioners were found ineligible from a list of pensioners. The department was supposed to conduct a quarterly review of such pensioners to decide on their eligibility - but it never did. If this is the percentage (78%) of people being wrongly given pension in a small list, one shudders to think what is happening overall !

Some of the pensioners were long dead, some were financially sound and some had shifted:

The Appellant had provided 32 names where he stated that old age pension and widow pensions were being given wrongly. Consequent to this the department has carried out an investigation and discovered that some of the persons to whom pension was being paid were dead, some were shifted and some were financially sound. The PIO admits that as per the rules a reinvestigation has to be done every quarter but in practice this is not being done. It appears that if 25 out of 32 were found to be not eligible the total percentage of people to whom these pensions are being given may be very large. It is distressing that such a large amount of money is being paid without verification being done at some reasonable interval. It is apparent that public money is being thrown away without verification.

The CIC also asked such information to be suo-motu declared under Sec 4 of the RTI Act:

The Commission has given various orders to the Department to make suo-moto declaration under Section-4 of its various schemes, names of beneficiaries and other details under it obligations under Section-4. The Department for the last six months has been defying the orders of the Commission and refusing to obey these orders.
The PIO is directed to ensure that all the earlier order issued by the Commission are complied with before 20 April 2010. The PIO is directed to send the report along with the url address where the information has been uploaded. The same may also be emailed to rtimonitoring@gmail.com. The Report must include:
1). Measures taken to fulfill disclosure obligations under Section 4 including making information available on your official website as well as hard copies of the information at the department’s offices.
2). Measures put in place to ensure regular updating of the information uploaded on the websites and made available at the offices.

From the above, it seems that CIC has a new email id for RTI Monitoring: rtimonitoring (at) gmail (dot) com.

The full order is attached to this post.

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[taurus]

Sponsorer

It is strange that despite observing that the Department is not implementing the orders of the CIC, the CIC does not deem it fit to issue even show cause notice for penalty and ofcourse, recommending disciplinary action for recurring misdemeanour.