NEW DELHI The database of India’s public well being assurance scheme, the world’s largest, has a number of discrepancies that led to crores of rupees in expenditure on ineligible beneficiaries, primarily attributable to insufficient validation controls, a efficiency audit by the Comptroller and Auditor General has discovered.

The faults within the database of Ayushman Bharat – Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (AB-PMJAY) embody invalid names, unrealistic dates of delivery, duplicate well being IDs and unrealistic household sizes, the federal government’s auditor mentioned in a report tabled in Parliament on Tuesday.

“In the absence of adequate validation controls, errors were noticed in beneficiary database… In 36 cases, two registrations were made against 18 Aadhaar numbers and in Tamil Nadu, 4,761 registrations were made against seven Aadhaar numbers,” the report mentioned. “Registration of multiple beneficiaries against same or invalid mobile number ranging from 11 to 7,49,820 beneficiaries were noted in the Beneficiary Identification System (BIS).”

For occasion, between 2018 to 2021, 16,865 and 335 ineligible beneficiaries, respectively, have been recognized by well being authorities in Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh, after cleansing knowledge of the Socio Economic and Caste Census, it mentioned.

In six states and Union territories, ineligible households have been discovered registered as PMJAY beneficiaries and had availed the advantages of the well being scheme. “The expenditure on these ineligible beneficiaries ranged from ₹0.12 lakh in Chandigarh to ₹22.44 crore in Tamil Nadu,” the auditor mentioned after scrutinising knowledge for the interval between September 2018 and March 2021.

The report was tabled on a day when junior well being minister SP Singh Baghel in a written reply to Rajya Sabha mentioned that the Indian authorities makes use of synthetic intelligence and machine studying applied sciences to detect suspicious transactions and potential frauds beneath AB-PMJAY.

“These technologies are used for prevention, detection and deterrence of health care frauds in the scheme’s implementation and are helpful in ensuring appropriate treatment to the eligible beneficiaries,” Baghel replied to a query raised by the BJP’s Neeraj Shekhar and the Janata Dal (United)’s Ram Nath Thakur.

The central authorities’s flagship public insurance coverage scheme was launched on September 23, 2018, to realize common well being protection, as beneficial within the National Health Policy of 2017.

The scheme was rolled out in rural and concrete areas primarily based on deprivation and occupational standards of the SECC 2011 for not less than 107.4 million households, or about 500 million individuals, with an goal to “reduce out-of-pocket expenditure of the poor and vulnerable population.”

The report identified massive gaps in hospital empanelment and administration, with a number of states displaying scarcity of infrastructure, gear, medical doctors and non-functional gear. Some of the Empanelled Health Care Providers (EHCPs) neither fulfilled minimal standards of assist system and infrastructure, nor conformed to the standard requirements and standards prescribed beneath the rules, the CAG discovered.

In a number of states, obligatory compliances standards for empanelment of hospitals referring to infrastructure, hearth security measures, biomedical waste administration, air pollution management and hospital registration certificates weren’t absolutely adopted, the report mentioned.

In some well being care suppliers, hearth security certificates had expired earlier than empanelment beneath PMJAY, it mentioned. Also, among the hospitals didn’t conform to the prescribed high quality requirements and standards, which have been essential to the protection and well-being of beneficiaries and have been obligatory minimal situations for empanelment.

In addition, the provision of hospitals per lakh beneficiaries was low, starting from 1.8 in Bihar to 26.6 hospitals in Goa. Among others, Assam had 3.4, Dadra Nagar Haveli-Daman Diu 3.6, Maharashtra 3, Rajasthan 3.8 and Uttar Pradesh had 5.

In Jharkhand, two non-public hospitals weren’t offering three specialities beneath the scheme, which have been in any other case obtainable for most people. In Assam, 13 hospitals have been offering 4% to 80% of obtainable services to the beneficiaries, the auditor discovered.

The CAG report talked about that the implementation of the scheme wants enchancment within the gentle of the findings. “It is expected that the compliance to the observations and recommendations made in this report will help in improving the implementation of the scheme,” it mentioned.