PMJAY would be able to reach 25 lakh people if it ropes in five lakh Uber drivers. (File) PMJAY would be able to reach 25 lakh people if it ropes in five lakh Uber drivers. (File)

The National Health Agency (NHA) is tying up with taxi aggregator Uber to publicise the Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PMJAY) and also to reach out to the 5 lakh Uber drivers across the country, many of whom are eligible for the programme but are yet to receive their Gold (beneficiary identification) cards. So far, about 1 crore cards have been issued – which means PMJAY has reached about five crores of its intended 50 crore target population.

NHA, which is the implementing authority for the Rs 5 lakh annual health insurance programme for 10.74 crore families, is also planning to reach out to other service aggregators such as Swiggy, Zomato, Airbnb and Oyo, both for branding and for reaching out to their staff — the delivery boys and the cleaning staff. Many of whom may have migrated from their homes and are the ones for whom the national portability feature of PMJAY was designed.

National portability means that a person with an Ayushman Bharat e-card can be treated in any empanelled hospital in the country irrespective of his or her state of origin.

NHA will sign a memorandum of understanding with Uber sometime this week. Under the terms, Uber vehicles will carry the PMJAY branding but the NHA will not pay them for it. Ayushman Bharat CEO Dr Indu Bhushan says: “We are using all possible channels for reaching out to our potential beneficiaries. Getting to the last person in the line is not easy and will require partnerships and some out-of-the-box thinking.”

Five lakh drivers mean through the exercise, PMJAY would be able to reach 25 lakh people.

As a PMJAY partner, for now Uber will set up Partner Seva Kendras in ten cities across the country. These include Gurgaon, Delhi, Noida, Pune, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Lucknow and Jaipur.

Beneficiary verification was undertaken at the Panchayat level through the rural development ministry’s Gram Swaraj Abhiyan over several months last year. However, that process inevitably left out families that had moved out in search of work or for other reasons.

The list of beneficiaries for PMJAY has been drawn up based on the data of the socio-economic caste census. The list automatically includes names of families that have no shelter, are destitute/living on alms, are manual scavengers or primitive tribal groups or are legally released bonded labourers. Any family that fulfills one of seven defined deprivation criteria – households with one or less room, kuccha walls and kuccha roof, with no adult member in household between age 18 and 59, a female-headed household with no adult male member between 16 and 59, households with differently able member with no other able-bodied adult member, SC/ST households, households with no literate adult above age 25 years and landless households deriving a major part of their income from manual labour – is included in the list.

Meanwhile, in the first purge last week of the PMJAY beneficiary list since its launch, the National Health Agency has removed the names of a sitting MP, one Uttar Pradesh minister, one MLC and one former MP from the list. While Uttar Pradesh industries minister Satish Mahana had himself flagged to the state health authority the discrepancy of his name being on the list, in case of the others, the district administrations swung into action following media reports and complaints.

Apart from Mahana, the names of Unnao MP Sakshi Maharaj, former Rajya Sabha MP Naresh Agrawal and UP MLC Jaipal Singh Vyast have been removed. Agarwal says he had no knowledge that his name is on the beneficiary list. As a senior government official put it, the PMJAY beneficiary list is now “10.74 crore families minus four families”.

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