- Crisil, the Indian arm of Standard & Poor's, estimates that the federal subsidy bill could fall by 20%, or Rs 250 billion ($3.94 billion) a year, if the direct benefit transfer scheme is fully implemented.
- India plans to phase in cash transfers of food and kerosene subsidies from September, saving 10-15% of the $21 billion in annual outlays on the benefits by eliminating fraud, a senior finance ministry official said on Thursday.
- Three so-called union territories, directly administered by the central government, would become a testbed for the measures, said Peeyush Kumar, the senior finance ministry official in charge of the cash transferscheme.
- Under the programme, each family will get a monthly subsidy of about Rs 500-700 ($19), which would be linked to a state-set procurement price of grains.
- Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has completed one year in power, wants to improve targeting of food and fuel subsidies to reach the poor - monetising benefits previously paid in kind that often went to waste or were stolen.
- He launched a 'Digital India' drive on Wednesday to offer public services by linking bank accounts, identity cards and mobile phones in a national database.
- Indian plans to reduce its subsidy bill by about 10 percent to $38.4 billion this fiscal year, about 14% of federal spending on programmes offering subsidised food, fertiliser and fuel, helped by reforms and lower crude oil prices.
- The federal government has set a deadline of December for states to computerise all data on households now receiving subsidised food and fuel - to remove 'ghost', or fake, beneficiaries, Kumar told a seminar on benefit reforms.
- Direct payments for cooking gas into people's bank accounts, launched earlier this year, have reduced sales of subsidised fuel by about one-fourth, mainly by eliminating ghost beneficiaries, said finance ministry adviser Arvind Subramanian.
Chandrakant Raghunath Patil, MP from Navsari, adopted Chikhli. Chikhli seen improvement in Sanitation and road renovation under SAGY. The infrastructure is improved.It is emerging as the template of village development. Patil completed the task in just three months. 380 toilets were built in Chikhli, many of them in the two slums life has become better after construction of toilet in their houses regular affair during the monsoons. A huge Shiva statue built six years ago by an NRI on the river bank had lost its colour and texture. The MP built a protection wall all along the riverbank and renovated a temple and the Shiva idol. renovation of road circles in a public-private partnership putting waste collection bins around the village, procurement of a diagnosis machine for the Rotary Eye Hospital (in the nearby Navsari), a library in the village panchayat office, gas-based cremation at the village crematorium, a modern aganwadi centre and a bus stop.
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