168: 70-80 percent of the beneficiaries will lose the benefit

In the pre-election period, the government, which distributes widespread “social benefits” and privileges at the expense of the state budget, has launched an attack on citizens and taxpayers after the elections.

A few days after the elections, they decided to surprise socially disadvantaged families as well. From July 1, they will introduce new criteria for assessing the insecurity of families and based on them, they will decide who meets the requirements to receive benefits. As much as they try to present the introduction of new standards in different packaging, it has one main goal: to give the least amount of people social benefits.

After the investment, almost 70-80 percent of citizens receiving benefits will be deprived of benefits.

The deadline for the introduction of the new criteria for the assessment of insecurity was specially set for July 1, in order to avoid a wave of dissatisfaction before the elections. The elections are over, now they can freely do everything they hid before the elections.

After the introduction of new assessment criteria, tens of thousands of families will be deprived of the opportunity to receive benefits. Perhaps, the results of the pilot program carried out before that testify to that.

The pilot program was implemented in Kotayk and Syunik marzes, after which the number of families included in the insecurity assessment system was drastically reduced.

If before the implementation of the pilot program in 2025 At the beginning, 3,762 families received family benefits in Kotayk Marz, after the introduction of new assessment criteria, only 1,125 received them.

The number of families receiving benefits was reduced by 3.3 times. Out of the previous 3762 families, 2637 were deprived of the opportunity to receive benefits.

The same is the case in Syunik region. 2025 at the beginning, the number of beneficiary families reached 1219. This year, 350 families remained, reduced by almost 3.5 times.

According to the latest data, only 1,280 of the almost 5,000 families receiving benefits in Kotayk and Syunik marzes are left after changing the assessment criteria.

The rest miraculously became non-insecure. But not because their lives changed drastically in that short time, they stopped being socially insecure anymore, but because they were left out through the tightening of evaluation criteria.

Now they have decided to spread this system widely to all other marzes from July 1. After that, it is not difficult to imagine how many beneficiary families will be left out of the system and will be deprived of the opportunity to receive several thousand drams of benefits, with which many are able to solve the problem of daily bread.

What they are going to do is an anti-social policy towards many families. But this policy is not new that these authorities are implementing. After they came to power, tens of thousands of families have already been deprived of benefits. Most of the rest will be deprived after July 1, after the introduction of the new criteria for assessing insecurity.

Until 2018 More than 100,000 families received family benefits in Armenia. As of June 1 of this year, the number of these families was 46 thousand.

In eight years, the number of families receiving benefits was reduced by more than 54 percent or 2.2 times. In eight years, 54,000 families have had their benefits cut off.

“This, of course, is also an indicator of the decrease of general poverty, the indicators of which we see from the figures published by our partners, the National Statistical Service,” this is how Social Security Minister Arsen Torosyan tries to justify depriving people of benefits, forgetting that, according to the latest data, there are more than 650 thousand poor people in Armenia, and their number, as well as the level of poverty, have not undergone tangible changes in the past 8 years. Under these circumstances, depriving 54 percent of indigent families of benefits is not a consequence of improving their social condition, but rather a result of deliberately tightening the criteria for assessing insecurity and thus depriving people of several thousand drams of social benefits.

After the introduction of new assessment criteria, more families will be deprived of the benefit. Of today’s 46 thousand, probably 10-15 thousand will remain.

Eight years ago, more than 100,000 families received benefits. Until now, 54 thousand people have been deprived, in the near future another 30-35 thousand people will be deprived.

After all this, they boast that they have increased the allowances. But they don’t say that they have done it, they are going to do it from now on by leaving tens of thousands of beneficiary families out of the system and depriving them of benefits.

The current system of assessing insecurity has indeed many problems. But that does not mean that by forcefully removing people from that system, their social problems will be solved.

It is not difficult to understand why they decided to introduce new criteria for assessing insecurity. the budget money is in the economy, on insecure citizens. They are inventing new ways to distribute their bonuses amounting to millions, and they are depriving the needy of a few thousand drams of benefits. They think that by artificially changing the criteria for assessing social insecurity and blowing dust in people’s eyes, poverty will disappear or people will start living better.

HAKOB KOCHARYAN

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