NGOs in dock
In the vast tapestry of India’s diverse social landscape, a series of threads are being pulled, threatening to unravel the intricate fabric of its civil society.
The Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan and the Pension Parishad will keep on the movement that aimed at resumption of payment of pensions to lakhs of poor elderly or disabled ones who have been declared (digitally dead) following exclusion of their names from the government list of pensioners. The NGOs have been working on this issue for quite sometime collecting data and studying individual cases.
Based on this sometime back they raised the issue with Rajasthan Additional Chief Secretary, Social Justice, Empowerment and Rural Development, Kuldeep Raka and also wrote to the state CMO. On Tuesday last, the crusaders had gone to Delhi to raise crucial issue of livelihood of poor masses, the MKSS spokesman Nikhil Dey said on Friday.
He said – “We went to Delhi from Rajasthan to raise before the Centre the issue of digital exclusion of this huge number of pensioners, from pension list of the Rajasthan government. This list marked them as dead. He said in Delhi, they met Justice Madan Lokur, Prashant Bhushan, Dipa Sinha, Usha Ramanathan, Mathew Cherian, Murlidharan, held a press conference to share their findings with the media.
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He said they called on Union Rural Development Secretary Shailesh Singh and handed him a memorandum in this regard and now are trying to meet Rajasthan Chief Secretary Sudhansh Pant to make their presentation and get the record straight in favour of the affected pensioners so that their pension is resumed.
This claim, Nikhil says, is based on evidence from across Rajasthan collated by people’s movements. This is not about Rajasthan alone as similar problems have been reported from the states of Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh, Haryana and Telangana, too. In fact, these are not isolated issues but structural flaws, experts remarked.
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