Telangana, Centre joust for credit as schemes clash

HYDERABAD: With exit polls giving Prime Minister Narendra Modi a second term on May 23, there is some concern in Telangana over how the Centre will respond when central government schemes clash with state schemes.
After the Centre’s Kisan Samman Nidhi scheme which is similar to Telangana’s Rythu Bandhu scheme of direct benefit transfer to farmers, the state government is in dilemma over merging its flagship KCR Kit programme with the Centre’s Pradhan Mantri Matruvandana Yojana ( PMMY).
The Telangana scheme gives Rs 13,000 to the mother when a girl is born and Rs 12,000 for a boy. The scheme can be availed twice. The Centre, on the other hand, gives Rs 6,000 once whether it is a boy or girl. Both schemes were launched in 2017.
Sources told TOI that the state government is under pressure to merge both schemes and reduce Telangana’s share. Officials told TOI that a central team recently interacted with health and women welfare department officials in Hyderabad and asked the K Chandrasekhar Rao (KCR) government to separately identify beneficiaries under the PMMY, and reduced the state share which Telangana is unwilling to do.
While the Centre has spent around Rs 2,500 crore under PMMY across the country, Telangana has not received any funds so far. In the last financial year, the KCR government had spent about Rs 500 crore on the scheme and covered 2.8 lakh women.
Officials point out that the Centre wants the state to avoid duplicate beneficiaries and make sure that the benefit is given with a stamp of the central government. “The exercise to exclude duplicate beneficiaries is difficult, unlike in Kisan Samman Nidhi and Rythu Bandhu. It is likely we may not merge both schemes,” pointed out an official. Sources added that the Centre’s share is lying in an escrow account.
Telangana had conducted an elaborate exercise to delink Rythu Bandhu and Kisan Samman Nidhi as per the guidelines of the Centre.
“This trend of linking or delinking state and central schemes indicates a serious shift in the ways of the central government. Earlier, funds were just given to states without conditions and questions, but the Centre now wants people to know who is funding each scheme,” an official said.