Shimla, April 19: In a startling revelation, the Him Parivar database has exposed deep flaws in the state’s welfare delivery system, with 39,697 deceased beneficiaries found to be still drawing social security pensions—raising serious questions on administrative oversight in Government of Himachal Pradesh schemes.
The findings, emerging from the state’s ambitious digital registry drive under Chief Minister Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu, also flagged 5,595 ineligible and 600 untraceable beneficiaries.
While the government claims this clean-up has led to monthly savings of around ₹5 crore, the figures point to years of unchecked leakages and weak ground-level verification.
The Him Parivar initiative, launched in the 2023–24 Budget, claims to have onboarded 19,25,258 families and 75,92,697 individuals into a unified State Social Registry.
But the detection of such large-scale discrepancies has shifted the spotlight from achievement to accountability.
Officials credit the HimAccess Single Sign-On system—now used by over 7.2 lakh citizens and nearly 46,000 government employees—for enabling data integration and verification.
However, critics argue that the very need for such massive corrections exposes systemic failures that existed long before digitisation.
The government further admits that verification of over 1,07,071 pending beneficiary cases—entailing a monthly burden of about ₹11 crore—is still underway, indicating that the clean-up exercise is far from complete.
Beyond pensions, the initiative has mapped 23,91,536 electricity connections, verified 14,77,098 land records and surveyed 2,11,698 urban families covering over 6.63 lakh individuals.
Yet, experts warn that large-scale data consolidation without strong field validation risks creating fresh exclusion errors, potentially depriving genuine beneficiaries.
While the Sukhu government projects Him Parivar as a leap towards data-driven governance, the exposure of thousands of “ghost beneficiaries” underscores a harsher reality—of a welfare system that functioned for years with glaring loopholes.
As the state pushes forward with its digital overhaul, the key question remains: will data correction translate into real accountability on the ground, or merely remain a statistical clean-up exercise?
