State Minister for Social Welfare Farzana Sharmin today told the House that the government has taken an initiative to re-check the beneficiary lists of various social safety-net programmes to remove ineligible 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 rechecking 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 programmes.

Responding to the question, the state minister said former Prime Minister Begum Khaleda Zia had introduced these social safety programmes 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 programmes.

“We’ve taken a decision to form committees in different upazilas so that the lists can be rechecked properly and the deserving people can receive the cards and benefits. Our goal is to improve people’s living standards. We must remain sincere so that the real people receive the allowances,” said Farzana Sharmin.

Replying to a starred question from treasury bench lawmaker Zainul Abdin Farroque, she said the existing beneficiary lists are currently being re-examined to identify who are genuinely eligible to receive the benefits under the programmes.

She also mentioned that the various social safety net beneficiary lists prepared during the fascist regime would surely be scrutinized and thus they would go towards a solution.

“We’re taking feedbacks so that we can go towards a solution after addressing the irregularities exist in the different social safety net allowances,” she added.

Responding to another supplementary question from Gazi Nazrul Islam, Satkhira-4, the State Minister said that they would consider bringing any unidentified sector deemed eligible for the social safety schemes to reach benefits to the real beneficiaries.

Sharmin also mentioned that the present government has been trying to work with utmost sincerity keeping aside nepotism adding that the perfect example of this is the recent rolling out of the ‘Family Card’.