According to the New York times, the oldest woman on this planet, Jeanne Calment of France died in 1997 at the age of 122 and the Ecuador times reported that the oldest woman alive, Ms. Misao Okawa of Japan, celebrated her 116th birthday on March 6 this year.
This may come as a surprise to you, but women between the age group of 200 to 500 years are sewing clothes and riding cycles in Chhattisgarh.
532 year-old woman gets sewing machine
According to the information provided by the Chhattisgarh Labor Department under the Right to Information (RTI) Act, Pushpa Sahu, a resident of Abhanpur area in Raipur, is the world’s oldest woman at the age of 732, and she received a cycle under ‘Mukhyamantri Cycle Sahayata Yojana’ (CM Cycle distribution scheme) last year.
The details provided by the Chhattisgarh Labour Department had raised doubts about the real beneficiaries of the Rs 40 crore schemes.
According to information obtained by Mr.Sanjeev Agrawal, the president of Rajiv Brigade, under the RTI Act, over 7000 women from Raipur district in the age group of 100-732 years have benefited through Chhattisgarh government’s women welfare schemes.
The two schemes, Mukhyamantri Silai (sewing) Machine Yojana and Mukhyamantri Cycle Sahayata Yojana were initiated in 2008 by the state government to support women laborers working in the unorganized sector under which cycles and sewing machines were distributed to the female members of the identified families.
The report further says that in Raipur, around 19,399 sewing machines were distributed to women in the unorganised sector. The list of beneficiaries includes 6,189 women aged 114 years, six women aged 202 years, three women aged 212 years old, and two aged 282 years. Interestingly, at least 14 women are shown above 300 years, and seven in their 400s. The age of one woman was even mentioned as 532 years.
Mr. Agarwal and his activists friends tried to locate Pushpa Sahu, Usha Jamgade and other over-aged beneficiaries of the scheme but they could not be tracked as their addresses given in the RTI information were “too vague”.
“This data is only Raipur specific. This must have happened in other districts as well. I have asked the state Congress Chief Bhupesh Baghel to coordinate with his district chiefs and get the data related to each district of Chhattisgarh,” Mr. Agrawal told the reporters and alleged that the information showed something “unlawful” happened during the distribution under these schemes.
However, Chhattisgarh Labor Department has blamed “software glitch” for the “faulty” data.
“It happened because of software discrepancy. We had outsourced the work of data entry. There was a data entry gap which culminated in the process of one RTI activist getting some wrong data,” said Mr. Jiten Kumar, Labor Commissioner of Raipur.
But Chhattisgarh Congress spokesperson Shailesh Nitin Trivedi has demanded a CBI inquiry into the alleged irregularities in the Cycle and Sewing Machine distribution.
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