Delivery Scheme Scam
As per media reports, dated August 25, 2020, a delivery scheme scam came into limelight in Bihar’s Muzaffarpur district in which 18 transactions were made in fake accounts. As per the scheme, for institutional delivery, a woman gets Rs 1,400 and an ASHA worker, who brings the woman to a primary health centre, gets Rs 600. On August 2, such payments were made to the bank accounts of 18 women.
According to records of the Mushahari block community health centre, a sixty-five-year-old woman of Chhoti Kothia village was shown to have given birth to 13 children in the past 18 months. She was among 18 other women, who were enrolled as beneficiaries in a scheme to encourage institutional deliveries and money received against their names.
The scam was revealed when an operator of a customer service point of State Bank of India (SBI) visited the home of one of these women on August 6 and asked her to visit the customer service point to put her thumb impression on a form to resolve a matter regarding some deposited amount in her account by the government had been wrongly transferred to another account.
The woman became suspicious as she was not enrolled as a beneficiary in any scheme. So, she visited the Mushahari block community health centre and came to know that 17 women from her village and another from the adjoining Rahua village were listed as beneficiaries of an institutional delivery scheme whereas none these 18 women was pregnant.
Similarly, a fifty-nine-year-old resident of Chhoti Kothia village was shown as having given birth to eight children in the past 13 months. As per the block community health centre records, she gave birth to two children a day apart, whereas she has four children and the youngest is a 17-year-old daughter.
The matter is being investigated; the DM has ordered all primary healthcare centres to submit payment details of institutional deliveries for the past two years.
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