To target Maya,Cong goes to grassroots

The exercise is being managed by Rahul Gandhi’s office in New Delhi. The UP Congress Committee has not been involved. “We have been asked to concentrate on planning the Assembly elections,’’ a party leader said.

State Congress president Rita Bahuguna Joshi said,“Rahul Gandhi is very serious about the use of RTI in identifying misappropriation of funds. Last month,Youth Congress workers from UP were given training about how to do spot verification of Janani Suraksha Yojana beneficiaries. They have started door-to-door verification.”

A separate cell in the Youth Congress,both in Lucknow and in Delhi,is monitoring the exercise. The volunteers have been asked to work quietly and send regular updates. The target is to complete the work by December-end and there are clear instructions to change non-performers immediately,it is learnt.

The JSY is meant to promote maternal and neonatal care by encouraging institutional deliveries. Women are paid a cash incentive of Rs 1,400 in rural areas and Rs 1,000 in urban areas. There have been complaints of officials pocketing the money.

The Congress wants to make village-wise lists of women who did not get the money,and use the information to target Mayawati.

The audit is based on information received through different RTI applications,the first of which was filed by Rita Joshi on April 27 in the presence of Rahul Gandhi in Lucknow.

In July,the Chief Medical Officer of Lucknow gave her a 28,000-page reply that listed 1.62 lakh beneficiaries in the district. The party was asked to obtain information about other districts locally.

The Congress office here sent the data to Rahul Gandhi’s office,and the Youth Congress was asked to file RTI applications to obtain village and blockwise lists from other districts. They were also asked to seek details of other NRHM schemes.

The current exercise is confined to the JSY. Though the party had sought details of various NRHM schemes for the last five years,only beneficiaries in the last one-and-a-half years are being covered in the survey.

The volunteers were trained by a Hyderabad NGO which has done social audit of various schemes in Andhra Pradesh.

The villages for the survey were selected after a scrutiny of official records. For example,if the lists of two villages have several common names,it becomes suspect,sources said.

Sources said verification of the statewide data was a colossal task and so they chose a limited number of constituencies where the party organisation can draw maximum political advantage from the results of the survey.