Over a million omitted from Iran cash handout list: Report
The Iranian government has reportedly removed more than a million people from its cash handout list, saying they are well-off and are not eligible to receive subsidies.
An exclusive report by the semi-official Mehr news agency published on Sunday said that the government had omitted another 100,000 parents from its list of monthly cash handouts when it paid a 104th installment of 455,000 rials (nearly $4) per person last week.
The report did not provide the source of the information. However, it estimated that 400,000 people had been affected by the decision which came a month after the government halted payments for 162,000 parents, or 700,000 family members.
Cash handouts were introduced in Iran in November 2010 when a previous administrative government decided to decrease subsidies paid for energy to raise the money needed for social welfare and economic development plans.
The handouts had been initially meant to reach lower classes but the government decided to go for an all-inclusive system after it failed to come up with a decisive list that could reflect the social stratification in Iran.
The current government announced over the summer that it would start downsizing the list of recipients, saying payment to a total of 24 million people would be halted by late March 2020, when the current Iranian calendar year comes to an end.
Those 24 million people deemed ineligible to receive cash handouts are in fact members of the three highest income deciles of the Iranian population.
Parents who think they have been wrongly omitted from the list are allowed to lodge a protest on a government website. They will have their halted handouts back once the government endorses their complaint.
The government has not indicated whether people on the lower income deciles would receive more cash handouts as a result of the changes in the current system.
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