Lok Satta president and MLA N Jayaprakash Narayan said the state government should identify the genuinely poor and make available food grain supplied by the Centre.
Welfare schemes in Andhra Pradesh are so poorly designed and badly implemented that they have failed to improve the lot of the beneficiaries and only ended up perpetuating poverty, Lok Satta president and MLA N Jayaprakash Narayan alleged here today.
Talking about the reported indictment of the state's welfare schemes by the Planning Commission, he said the pet schemes of the Congress government like Rs2-a-kg rice scheme, free power and Rajiv Arogya Sri health insurance have only made the beneficiaries depend on the government for relief perennially instead of improving their purchasing power.
"The rice scheme was introduced by late NTR in 1983. Free power is being for a very long time. If these schemes were appropriate and effectively implemented, then why there is still a clamour for white ration cards though almost 80% of the population already have white ration cards?," he asked.
White ration cards are meant for Below Poverty Line (BPL) people.
Narayan said the state government should identify the genuinely poor and make available food grains supplied by the Centre through village panchayats.
"Arogya Sri health scheme again testifies to the state government's skewed priorities. It helps only 500 of the 20,000 odd patients who are admitted to hospitals both in the private and public sectors in the state every day. All the others have to incur out of pocket expenditure.
"Arogya Sri with its focus on super-specialty care has only enriched corporate hospitals," he alleged.
Narayan, a former member of the Administrative Reforms Commission, urged chief minister K Rosaiah and Telugu Desam chief N Chandrababu Naidu to redesign the policies in such a way that it helped the poor genuinely.
The Planning Commission has reportedly found fault with the state government's welfare schemes, saying they did not improve the lot of the poor people despite involving huge expenditure.
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