The Supreme Court Thursday permitted the Centre to conduct an inquiry into “fake claims” for ex gratia meant for the families of Covid-19 victims after claim numbers in multiple states vastly overshot their respective government’s official death figures.
The court also set an “outer time limit” for filing ex gratia claims — 60 more days for deaths before March 20, 2022, and 90 days from the date of death for future cases. It agreed with the Centre that claiming ex gratia could become an “endless” process and raise the spectre of fake claims if no time limit is fixed.
The bench of Justices M R Shah and B V Nagarathna allowed the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) “to carry out the random scrutiny of 5% of the claim applications by the States of Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Kerala and Maharashtra at the first instance” to find out if any fake claims were being submitted to claim compensation.
The order came on a plea by the Centre that raised the issue of “fake claims”. Appearing for the Centre, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta also urged the court to fix an outer time limit of four weeks.
It said: “(Mehta) is also right in apprehending that if there is no outer time limit fixed, then the process of receiving the claims would go endless and, in that case, there is all possibility of submitting false claims”.
The court, however, was of the opinion that four weeks “is too short” and said “the family would need some reasonable time to recover from the death and sorrow and...
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