Kolkata: BJP MLA Rudranil Ghosh on Saturday alleged widespread corruption in the monthly dole of Rs 4,000 to kirtan singers in the state since 2016. He claimed that among the 5 lakh registered kirtan singers in the state, as many as 2.5 lakh were “fake singers” who used to “sing praise of the previous govt and the former chief minister”. Addressing the state assembly, he compared these irregularities to the alleged illicit siphoning of funds linked to the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana in Bengal.
Demanding an investigation, Ghosh said, “The funds received on this pretext have gone down the drain. Since this scheme continued from 2016 to 2026, the total amount siphoned by these fake kirtan singers is Rs 1,200 crore”
Ghosh told TOI that there was an effort to position Tollywood as the sole representative of Bengali culture, which, according to him, pushed many folk artists into obscurity. “Many doles were given where 50% of the beneficiaries were fake. The current govt wants the development of culture. But it must exercise great caution in distributing funds for future initiatives, as these allocations have been misused in the past,” Ghosh added.
The All-India Kirtan, Baul and Devotional Singers Welfare Trust (Shilpi Sansad), which has been advocating for artist pensions since 2015, supported Ghosh’s request to investigate the matter to eliminate fraudulent beneficiaries. Siddhartha Shankar Naskar, the president of the trust, noted that the organisation had previously proposed helping compile a list of eligible artists for govt verification. “But this suggestion was not implemented. After the former chief minister introduced the Rs 1,000 monthly pension scheme in 2016, we discovered that numerous political cadres of TMC began collecting the funds. These individuals were also assigned at least three govt-sponsored programmes each month, raising their monthly income to Rs 4,000,” Naskar said. He added that this diversion of funds had left many authentic singers struggling in extreme poverty while ineligible individuals received the support. “We urge the new govt to set this right,” he said.