Govt to include housing scheme in DBT

The Ministry of Rural Development has initiated steps to bring its flagship Indira Awaas Yojana IAY under the ambit of Direct Benefits Transfer DBT scheme by next year. This comes at a time when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had expressed concerns about the monitoring of the scheme and Finance Minister P Chidambaram had cautioned that the implementation of the first phase has revealed bottlenecks that need to be ironed out as the programme expands.

The ministry has asked states to be ready to include IAY under DBT. A ministry official said the preparatory period has begun. This is like a soft launch, the official said. The ministry will create databases,ensure beneficiaries have bank accounts and link bank accounts to Aadhaar numbers.