Modisarkar@8: Populist schemes that benefited the poor

New Delhi, May 27: The Bharatiya Janata Party is all set to celebrate Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government's eight years in power.

In the last eight years, the BJP government has launched several schemes that are providing direct benefit to the poor across the country.

Let us take look at flagship schemes launched by the Narendra Modi government since 2014.

Ujjwala Yojana: The Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY) was launched in 2016 to provide 8 crore deposit free LPG connections to poor households. So far, the government has given over 600 million LPG connection under the scheme.

Ayushman Bharat: Launched in 2018, Ayushman Bharat- Pradhan Mantri Jan ArogyaYojana (PMJAY), known as world's largest government-funded healthcare program. The healthcare scheme has targeted 50 crore beneficiaries and provides a cover of up to Rs. 5 lakhs per family per year, for secondary and tertiary care hospitalisation. Latest figures show that 17.35 crores person till date received Ayushman Bharat cards and 2.61 crores person availed the facility of hospital admissions.

Jan-Dhan Yojana: Pradhan Mantri Jan-Dhan Yojana (PMJDY) is National Mission for Financial Inclusion to ensure access to financial services, namely, Banking/ Savings & Deposit Accounts, Remittance, Credit, Insurance, Pension in an affordable manner.

Kisan Samman Nidhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi (PMKISAN) from Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh on 24 February 2019 to supplement financial needs of land holding farmers. Under the scheme Rs. 2000 is credited to the bank accounts of selected beneficiary farmers.

Swachh Bharat Mission: The Swachh Bharat Mission is one of the biggest mass movements or Jan Andolan programmes of independent India. Announced on 02 October, 2014 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) aims to change the image of rural India through mass scale behaviour change.

"A clean India would be the best tribute India could pay to Mahatma Gandhi on his 150 birth anniversary in 2019," said Narendra Modi as he launched the Swachh Bharat Mission at Rajpath in New Delhi.

MUDRA yojana: MUDRA which stands for Micro Units Development & Refinance Agency Ltd, is a financial institution set up by the Government of India under PMMY for development and refinancing micro unit enterprises. It provides loans up to Rs.10 Lakh to the non-corporate, non-farm small/micro enterprises.

Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana

To achieve the objective of providing "Housing to All" by the year 2024, the Government of India rolled out the rural housing scheme, Pradhan Mantri Awaas Yojana-Gramin (PMAY-G) with effect from 1st April 2016. The program envisages the completion of 2.95 crore PMAY-G houses with all basic amenities by the year 2024. As on 21st February 2022, a total of 1.73 crores PMAY-G houses have been completed against the allocated cumulative target of 2.62 crore houses.

Under PMAY-G with the introduction of certain implementation reforms, the Government aims at improving the speed and quality of houses construction, ensuring timely release of funds to beneficiaries, direct transfer of funds to beneficiaries' accounts, technical assistance to beneficiaries, stringent monitoring through MIS-AwaasSoft and AwaasApp. The Scheme is being implemented and monitored through end to end e-governance solutions, AwaasSoft and AwaasApp. AwaasSoft provides functionalities for data entry and monitoring of multiple statistics related to implementation aspects of the scheme.

Since the launch of the scheme in 2016, efforts are being taken to make the software more user friendly. New modules have been added to the software for making it more accessible and maintain transparency in the implementation of the programme.

Make in India

'Make in India' is an initiative which was launched on 25th September, 2014 to facilitate investment, foster innovation, build best in class infrastructure, and make India a hub for manufacturing, design, and innovation. It is one of the unique 'Vocal for Local' initiatives that promoted India's manufacturing domain to the world.

Government has taken various steps to boost domestic and foreign investments in India. These include the introduction of Goods and Services Tax, reduction in Corporate taxes, financial market reforms, consolidation of public sector banks, enactment of four labour codes, improving ease of doing business, FDI policy reforms, other sectoral reforms, reduction in compliance burden, policy measures to boost domestic manufacturing through public procurement orders, Phased Manufacturing Programme (PMP), to name a few.