The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : Bhagyalakshmi scheme ready for rollout

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Saturday, Jun 16, 2007
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Karnataka

Karnataka - Bangalore

Bhagyalakshmi scheme ready for rollout

Alladi Jayasri

The Government will soon sign pact with LIC

BANGALORE: Fourteen months after it was announced, the Bhagyalakshmi scheme aimed at fighting female foeticide is set to become a reality.

The Government will soon sign a Memorandum of Understanding with Life insurance Corporation of India (LIC), which will administer the scheme proposed in April last by Deputy Chief Minister B.S. Yediyurappa with a budget allocation of Rs. 234 crore.

The Government, by December-end, identified 1,11,331 girls from families living below the poverty line, born after April 1 2006. It invited bids from financial institutions in August. It received responses only from LIC and the Unit Trust of India.

The scheme did not take off earlier because financial institutions were reluctant to share the task of identifying and tracking the beneficiaries. Under the scheme, Rs. 10,000 will be deposited in the name of a girl child to be given to her on her 18th birthday.

In an order issued on October 17, 2006, the Government spelled out the role of each department and also that of LIC, Shalini Rajnish, Secretary, Department of Women and Child Development, told The Hindu.

Nodal agency

The department is the nodal agency for identifying beneficiaries, tracking the child for 18 years and coordinating with various departments to activate the scheme. It will transfer remittances and healthcare benefits to the child and the parents.

The departments of e-governance, Finance, Planning, Health, Education, Urban Development, and Rural Development and Panchayati Raj will also be involved at various levels to create a database on the number of pregnancies, births and marriages and to monitor the child’s growth up to the age of six.

The exercise of identifying children under the Bhagyalakshmi scheme had thrown up statistics that could be used as indicators of a district’s ‘female foeticide quotient’, official sources said. For instance, between April and December 31, 2006, 3,24,250 girls were born and, of them, 1,11,331 had been identified as beneficiaries for the scheme.

According to the State Human Development Report, 2005, the percentage of BPL families in Raichur, a chronically backward district, is 45.6. During the period, 81,200 girls were born in the district. But only 2,504 (3.08 per cent) have been identified for the Bhagyalakshmi scheme.

Official sources said this could be seen as an indication that BPL families were not aware of the scheme as yet and, also, female foeticide was rampant. Contrarily, a district such as Mysore, which has good human development indices, has a much lower percentage of BPL families (15.5 per cent), but the coverage under the scheme is high at 62 per cent. Of 9,949 girls born, 6,168 have been identified for the scheme.

Child Rights Trust, a Bangalore-based non-governmental organisation, hopes that these numbers and the database created for the purpose of the scheme would be put to use in enabling children from non-BPL families to have access to education and food security.

‘A warning’

“Policymakers should see this as a warning. Female foeticide could be rampant among non-BPL families too and this needs to be addressed,” said the trust’s research coordinator, G.C. Satish.

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