Shanti Devi, a 70-year-old widow, spends her days cleaning houses in Okhla to earn a meagre sum as she has not got her government pension for over two years. “I went to the social welfare office. I showed them my passbook, my Aadhaar card, but they just gave me a slip saying my pension has been stopped and told me to approach the local MLA,” she says, pulling a creased bank passbook out of a small shopping bag held together with a safety pin. She can’t read it with eyes dulled by cataract, but it clearly shows that she last received her pension in October 2017.
She was one of the hundreds of elderly people, mostly women, who gathered at Jantar Mantar for a protest under the Pension Parishad banner on Tuesday, demanding universal old age pensions of at least half the minimum wage. Delhi currently gives a monthly pension of Rs.2,000-Rs.2,500 (depending on age and community) to five lakh pensioners, including senior citizens, widows and differently abled. The minimum wage in the State is Rs.14,842.
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