Mint Explainer: CAG audit exposes lapses in PMJAY. What are these?
₹ 5 lakh per family per year to over 10.741 crore families from the poor and vulnerable section of the population. PMJAY is an entitlement-based scheme which aims to improve affordability, accessibility, and quality of care for the poor and vulnerable section of the population. So far, 5,47,68,027 hospital admissions have been authorized and 24,42,78,276 Ayushman cards have been created under the scheme.
The CAG report said that in the absence of adequate validation controls, errors were noticed in beneficiary database i.e., invalid names, unrealistic date of birth, duplicate PMJAY IDs, unrealistic size of family members in a household, among others. For instance, multiple PMJAY beneficiaries were found to be linked with the same mobile number. These are invalid mobile numbers like 9999888877, 8888443322 etc.
This suggests that a large number of beneficiaries would have become eligible under the scheme fraudulently and would have availed treatment causing loss to exchequer. Ayushman Bharat PMJAY identifies beneficiaries through Aadhaar identification wherein the beneficiary undergoes the process of mandatory Aadhaar based e-KYC. The details fetched from the Aadhar database are matched with the source database and accordingly, the request for Ayushman card is approved or rejected based on the beneficiary details.
However, there is no role of mobile numbers in the verification process. The mobile number is captured only for the sake of reaching out to the beneficiaries in case of any need and for collecting feedback regarding the treatment provided. Is it true that the same random ten-digit mobile numbers were entered for beneficiary registration & verification? With regard to the use of the same mobile number by multiple
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