Haryana family ID scheme: Govt modifies July 22 order, says sharing family details ‘voluntary’

Also, the deadline of submitting such details to the government has been removed and employees have been asked to share their family details “at their earliest convenience”.

In government’s July 22 instructions, it had asked all the regular and contractual employees to submit their family’s details including names of all the family members and age, sex, Aadhaar card and mobile number of the family’s head by July 29.

The July 22 instructions had said, “In order to complete this exercise in a time-bound manner, it has been decided that all the state government employees including contractual employees and employees of boards/ corporations/ universities should submit their family details by July 29 and before the salary of July 2019 paid in August 2019 is disbursed to the employees”.

“How can the government force us to submit our family details? How can any government say that it will not give us salaries if we do not share our personal details with them? It is nowhere written in any Constitution or our service rules. It was an arbitrary decision and we have refused to share any such details with the government. It was for this reason that government had to withdraw its July 22 order,” Subhash Lamba, president of Sarv Karamchari Sangh – an umbrella body of various departments’ employee unions in the state told The Indian Express.

State government’s Finance Department withdrew its July 22 instructions on July 29. However, modified instructions were issued on July 30, in which the government clarified that it was only an “advisory” and employees were not bound to share their family details.

Government’s modified instructions addressed to all administrative secretaries, heads of departments, divisional and deputy commissioners, managing directors of boards and corporations and registrars of universities of the state, read, “The advisory may, therefore, please be brought to the notice of all employees including contractual employees of your department. They may be suitably advised to submit the family details to respective DDOs of the department in the prescribed pro-forma at their earliest convenience”.

Elaborating government’s aim behind collecting employees’ family details, a senior officer said, “PPP-family ID scheme is basically aimed to ensure that there is improvement in targeting government programmes. Idea is to improve government interface, governance and delivery of service. If we know who requires what service, then we can do that. If we do not know who requires what service, then the person who requires a service has to come to us and ask for that service. That is causing interface gap. Instead, if we already know about the employee’s profile and his family’s likely requirements, then we can deliver those benefits to them without them even applying for it. We can pull data from this database and deliver government schemes’ benefits to them”.

The officer, who did not wish to be named, added, “Since employees are directly connected with Drawing and Disbursing Officers (DDO) at the time of getting their salary, we thus made DDOs as nodal officers. The idea was that at the time of disbursal of salaries, DDOs can also collect these details from all the employees. But we never meant that the employees’ salary shall not be disbursed. Since, we did not want our instructions to be misinterpreted, we withdrew July 22 order and a modified version on July 30. Salary of all the employees has been disbursed”.

Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar, on July 25, had also launched a web portal facilitating collection of family details of all the employees aiming to provide a hassle-free benefits of various government schemes to eligible beneficiaries.

State government wants to create this database of families in Haryana aiming to provide benefits of Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY) scheme, medical benefits under Ayushman Bharat scheme, issuance of ration card, family pension, old age pension, widow pension, physically handicapped pension, various scholarship schemes, issuance of RC/driving licence, social welfare schemes, agriculture and horticulture schemes, subsidies. Government adds that through this database, a unique ID of every family will be issued that will be helpful in obtaining government and private jobs, especially to those families where no family member is in the job and it shall also help people seeking admission in school and colleges.