It is a huge cash advantage for the Modi government’s 7.47 lakh tea garden workers in Assam, as Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman has distributed 3,000 rupees each to 7.47 lakh tea garden workers in the state, making a total of 224 rupees. The Union Finance Minister was in town to participate in the program providing financial assistance to tea workers under the third tranche of Assam Chah Bagicha Dhan Puraskar’s melam program.
Uplifting tea gardeners
Prior to the Lok Sabha polls in 2014, Narendra Modi ji wanted to work for the upliftment of tea garden workers, and accordingly, several programs were launched after the NDA came to power, the union minister said, according to a report by the PTI news agency.
Assam Chah Bagicha Dhan Puraskar Mela Scheme
As part of the third tranche of the flagship program, an additional amount of Rs 3,000 each will be deposited into the bank accounts of 7,46,667 employees.
Each tea worker had previously received 5,000 rupees in two phases.
The incentive was created through the DBT (Direct Benefit Transfer) mode to 6,33,411 bank accounts of tea gardens in 2017-18 and 7.15,979 accounts in 2018-19 in 752 tea gardens.
Sitharaman said that with the introduction of the DBT mode in various schemes, all middlemen were eliminated and the center will continue to support tea gardens in Assam in the future. “PM Modi preferred the use of technology for the benefit of people in implementing the programs, and so the concept of DBT was introduced. As a result, middlemen were completely eliminated and the benefits passed directly to the beneficiaries,” she said.
Sitharaman said the Union budget for 2021-22 has allocated Rs 1,000 crore for the welfare of women and children of tea gardens in Assam and West Bengal, as requested by the BJP-led government in the northeastern state. “After bank accounts were opened for tea garden workers, some problems surfaced. But when I directed the bankers to correct the anomalies last February, they worked tirelessly, even during the COVID-19 crisis, and now everything is on the right track . ” She said.
On that occasion, Assam Finance Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said that Rs.224 billion will be spent on the transfer of the third tranche of the system to the beneficiaries. “We spent Rs 158 crore in the first year and it rose to Rs 202 crore in the second year. The program is not going to stop at Rs 3,000 each since we have already started sending that amount every month,” he said added.
