Staff Reporter:
State Minister for Social Welfare Farzana Sharmin yesterday told the House that the government has taken an initiative to re-check the beneficiary lists of various social safety-net programs to remove ineli-gible persons and thus ensure support reaches to the genuine recipients.
“We’re trying to identify the genuine beneficiaries in the lists. We’ll try to provide different allowances (under the social safety net) to the eligible people. We must correct the lists, reshuffling them and re-checking beneficiaries at the end-level…. We’ve already started working accordingly,” she said.
The state minister made the remarks while responding to a supplementary question from opposition lawmaker Shahjahan Chowdhury (Chattogram-15) during the question-answer session in the House.
In his question, the Jamaat-e-Islami lawmaker wanted to know whether the government would take steps to address irregularities and corruption in the social safety programs.
Responding to the question, the state minister said former Prime Minister Begum Khaleda Zia had intro-duced these social safety programs but different types of nepotism occurred later in the preparation of the beneficiary lists.
She said the government has taken a decision to form the upazila-level committees to review and verify the beneficiary lists under different social safety programs.
