Himanshu Kaushik | TNN | Sep 13, 2016, 07.06 AM IST
AHMEDABAD: In 2014, Gujarat was the leading state in terms of e-transactions, but since 2015, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana zoomed past Gujarat. Gujarat is now ranked third when it comes to e-transactions recorded live on Electronic Transaction Aggregation and Analysis Layer (E-TAAL) e-transaction database.
This raised the eyebrows of officials from Gujarat who analyzed the numbers and found that the two states had exorbitantly high figures in the rural development 'unemployment loans' category, as well as payments linked to Aadhaar cards.
For instance, Andhra Pradesh, which has a population of only 4.95 crore, claims that e-transactions under the head 'loans for unemployment in villages (krushe)' in rural development department had reported 68.65 crore transactions, and another 13.34 crore transactions which were linked to 'payments linked to Aadhaar(disbursement)'. The two heads accounted to 81.99 crore transactions. The total number of transactions recorded by AP from January 1 to August 9 were 90.70 crore!
A senior official said that if one looks at the volume of transactions in loans for unemployment in villages in AP it is clear that even a newborn baby would have got a loan for unemployment disbursed twice a month. Similarly, Telangana, which has a population of 3.52 crore has shown 44.5 crore unemployment loan e-transactions.
Officials realized that there was something wrong in the transaction volumes reported by the two states. Citing such anomalies, the Gujarat government's IT wing wrote to NIC to look into the discrepancies.
After this, since July 16 the two states have stopped all updates.
Dhananjay Dwivedi, secretary of science and technology, said, "We noticed major discrepancies, and hence we wrote to NIC to look into the transactions. The NIC has taken the issue seriously, and hence all updates in the rural development for the Andhra Pradesh and Telangana have been stopped since mid-July, soon after Gujarat raised the objection."
Meanwhile the number of e-transactions in Gujarat have fallen by 5.59 crore in the last two years, between January 1 and August 9. During the same period, in 2014, there were 44.34 crore transactions, but this dropped to 38.75 crore e-transactions this year.