From the time I was elected by the people of my constituency to represent their interest in Delhi Legislative Assembly, I have been visited by many people for pension benefits primarily meant for people who can’t afford even their basics. After understanding a pattern of the people visiting my office, I understood that I need to hold sabhas in the respective areas to find out people who actually need the pension. Last year over 1 lac fraud accounts were found because MLAs/Counselors/MPs use their discretion to award their known people, unfulfilling the criterion, with pension misusing their authority (Refer http://
In belief with the above belief, an open sabha was announced for people residing in one of the four wards viz. ward no. 163 in Dr. Ambedkar Park, Himayunpur, Safdarjung Enclave today at 5 PM. It was held purely along on the lines of Swaraj and we advertised the event using Auto-ricksaw and pamphlet .
When I detailed the gathered crowd that people who are desirous of the pension need to have the following three criterion viz. 1. should be of age 60 years and beyond 2. living in Delhi for minimum 5 years 3. must not be earning more than 5 thousands a month, many backed out. When I further requested them to bring people from their colonies who are too poor to even come to the meeting site, people did even that.
We received around 100 forms which will be checked vis-a-vis eligibility and other compliances.
This move of reaching out to the people who actually deserve the age old pension of 1000/- a month was loved by one and all.
Seeing the success, I will be opting the same process of finding the people, real worthy all government schemes, to avoid any misuse/abuse of the discretion.
