Gurugram: The variety of Beneath Poverty Line (BPL) ration playing cards in Haryana elevated by 1.2 million earlier than the 2024 Meeting elections, after which it fell to pre-election ranges, knowledge supplied by the Nayab Saini authorities revealed.
The information was submitted by Minister for Meals, Civil Provides and Client Affairs Rajesh Nagar on Monday, on the penultimate day of the winter session of the Haryana Meeting, in response to a starred query from Rohtak Congress MLA Bharat Bhushan Batra.
As of October 2023, Haryana had 39.32 million ration playing cards overlaying precedence households and Antyodaya Anna Yojana classes. This determine would develop to 51.72 million tickets by October 2024, forward of state elections that month, an unprecedented improve of 12.4 million tickets in a single yr. Nevertheless, by October 2025, only one yr later, that quantity had fallen by 11.03 million to 40.69 million, once more approaching 2023 numbers.
A district-wise breakdown of the info by ThePrint revealed essentially the most dramatic leap previously yr in Faridabad, with ration playing cards rising from 2.72 million in October 2023 to three.71 million in October 2024. Nevertheless, that quantity returned to 264,000,000 in October 2025.
Equally, in Hisar, ration playing cards elevated from 299,000 to three,630,000 after which decreased to 2,95,000 throughout the identical interval. In Gurugram, playing cards surged from 165,000 to 207,000 earlier than falling to only 122,000, the steepest decline in a yr.
MLA Batra mentioned that the comfort of the eligibility standards for ration playing cards in 2024 from month-to-month family revenue of Rs 120,000 to Rs 180,000 led to a rise within the variety of ration playing cards earlier than the elections and questioned how the variety of ration playing cards had come down in 2025 regardless that the standards remained unchanged.
In response, the Nayab Saini authorities mentioned that ration playing cards have been initially issued on the premise of self-declaration of revenue and that the quantity had lowered after it began the revenue verification course of.
Opposition events, nonetheless, attacked the federal government for briefly providing ration card advantages for voting, with opposition chief Bhupinder Singh Hooda calling it the “greatest electoral manipulation” the nation had witnessed.
“The Bharatiya Janata Occasion authorities gave BPL standing to 2.13 billion folks out of two.8 billion inhabitants in Haryana simply to safe votes. They handed out free meals like an election bribe and once they gained, they snatched playing cards from over 1.1 million households. That is nothing however ‘vote choli’ to steal votes via deception,” Hooda informed ThePrint on Tuesday.
“The beneficiary just isn’t a faux”
It’s estimated that every ration card covers a mean of 4 relations.
A number of Congress legislators on Monday demanded rapid restoration of ration playing cards that have been canceled in the course of the zero hour of the Haryana Meeting.
MLA Batra, who raised the difficulty, mentioned households have misplaced entry to free meals grains that they’d been receiving for a number of months and are actually struggling to make ends meet.
“These aren’t faux beneficiaries. These are actual households whose eligibility was licensed by the federal government itself. In the event that they have been eligible in October 2024, why are they all of a sudden ineligible in October 2025? The one factor that has modified is that the elections are over,” Batra informed the paper on Tuesday.
The Haryana authorities has built-in a complete welfare scheme for BPL and AAY cardholders, primarily via the Parivar Pechan Patra system. Households with an annual revenue of lower than Rs 180,000 are entitled to important meals safety, together with month-to-month wheat and oil rations. Additionally they take pleasure in cashless medical health insurance of Rs 50 lakh below the Chirayu Haryana scheme.
Past primary wants, the state supplies a monetary cushion. These embrace annual stipend of Rs 6,000 below Mukhya Mantri Parivar Samriddhi Yojana, subsidy house restore of as much as Rs 80,000 below Dr BR Ambedkar Awas Navinikaran Yojana, and social safety pension of Rs 3,000 per thirty days for eligible individuals.
(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)
Additionally learn: How the BJP tried to make use of ‘vote choli’ to launch a parliamentary assault in Haryana Meeting
