By Bizodisha Bureau, Bhubaneswar, November 3, 2019: In a bid to curb corruption and save resources, Odisha government proposes to come up with a Social Registry facilitating a single source of authenticated family details for all welfare programmes, officials said on Sunday.

In this regard, a stakeholders’ consultation to finalise this social protection delivery platform is being held here on November 5. The move assumes significance as recently 3.41 lakh fake beneficiaries were provided Rs 170 crore under the State’s flagship ‘KALIA’ scheme for farmers.

The concept paper prepared for this purpose underscores the need for the State to have data across schemes like correct and authenticated family details, single source of truth for all departments, metadata model, data standardization and normalization.

“The State required dynamic database where a citizen can update their demographic attributes once and that will be auto populated across scheme database. The State can do better beneficiary identification by accessing the socio-economic data of citizen to strategise new scheme and target beneficiary,” it says.

The social registry is expected to identify the correct target beneficiary and weed out ghost and ineligible beneficiaries.

Allegations of ghost beneficiaries gobbling up benefits keep coming at regular interval. In fact, there are more than 60 government social schemes for more than 70% of the population.

For security, it is proposed that no data should be stored by any other domain-specific application apart from data elements already common in both national social registry and scheme database. Local applications on desktop computers or mobile devices should not store any personally identifiable information.

“Security protocols should be in place from the point of data collection, transmission of data and to final destination where the data will be stored,” the concept paper says.