Maharashtra tops the list of Atmanirbhar Bharat Rozgar Yojana beneficiaries

Maharashtra has topped the list of states with maximum number of beneficiaries under the Atmanirbhar Bharat Rozgar Yojana followed by Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh, Rameswar Teli, minister of state for labour and employment said.

The total beneficiaries under the scheme stands at 3.97 million spread across 0.11 million establishments and the total benefits granted as on December 4, 2021 stands at Rs 2612.10 crore, the minister said in response to a question in Lok Sabha on Monday.

As per the response, Maharashtra has 0.64 million beneficiaries followed by 0.44 million in Gujarat, 0.53 million in Tamil Nadu, 0.31 million in Karnataka and 0.27 million in Uttar Pradesh.

North-eastern state of Nagaland was at the bottom with just 43 beneficiaries while Arunachal Padesh had 59 beneficiaries, either due to low job opportunities or smaller working age population, compared to other north-eastern states.

Assam had 11,873 beneficiaries followed by 3,091 in Tripura, 2,747 in Sikkim, 966 in Meghalaya, 765 in Manipur and 292 in Mizoram.

Minister Teli further said that the Employees Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO), had in January, 2020, introduced the auto settlement of Employees’ Provident Fund (EPF) claims along with multi-location claim settlement facility to provide the uninterrupted services to the EPF members at the time of any disaster like pandemic, floods, earthquake, etc when it may not be possible to process claims in such Disaster Affected office(s).

“This arrangement has helped in delivery of uninterrupted services to the EPF members and also helped in disaster proofing of the offices of EPFO,” he added.

Consequently, the average time taken to process claim settlement under EPFO has come down from 11.5 days in 2019-20 to 8.4 days in 2020-21 and 7.3 days in 2021-22 as on December 6, 2021.