PANAJI : As part of its drive to find the number of households without LPG connections who use kerosene for cooking and also to eliminate bogus beneficiaries of subsidised kerosene, the civil supplies department has struck off the names of 3,000 ration card holders from the list of genuine kerosene users after they were found using subsidised kerosene for cooking purposes in addition to LPG usage. With this, the number of genuine consumers of subsidised kerosene has come down from 1.25 lakh to 10,343 since the drive was started, the latest figures released by the department show.
The special drive that was first conducted between June to July in 138 fair price shops is a runaway success with the state managing to save 2,800 kilo litres a month. The state’s kerosene supplies presently stand at about 150 kilo litres a month.
However, after fresh applications were sought only 13,343 card holders had applied. Kerosene quota was also increased from 3.5 litres to 15 litres per cardholder at a rate of Rs 18 per litre.
The initiative takes forward state’s efforts to weed out bogus beneficiaries and re-identify those who do not have LPG connection by using the beneficiary’s Aadhaar number to validate non-LPG ration-card holders getting kerosene.
The figures were forwarded to the oil companies to cross check with their data and verify the names with their LPG dealers on LPG users to weed out bogus claims so that they can be facilitated to switchover to LPG usage under the central Ujjwala scheme.
The exercise is aimed at finding the number of households without LPG connections who use kerosene for cooking and come in the way of implementing the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Scheme and making Goa kerosene-free.
A civil supplies department official said that the department has stopped the supply of subsidised kerosene to bogus claimers starting last month.
About 92 per cent of the 1.25 lakh kerosene users in the state have been identified as bogus claimers for kerosene and nearly 8 per cent as genuine kerosene users.
However, the petroleum companies are still in the process of validating and ascertaining the genuineness of the applicants with their LPG dealers. The company officials have roughly estimated that there will be not more than 3,000 kerosene users in the state and further warned against bogus claimers.
According to census 2011 data, out of 3,22,813 households, 72.7 per cent cook food using LPG and about 4 per cent of the households use kerosene and 22 percent of them uses fire-wood as fuel. Similarly the same data shows less than 50 per cent of tribal household population have limited access to cooking gas and they mostly rely on firewood and kerosene for cooking.
