New Delhi, Sep 6: The government has approved the indefinite continuation of Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY). In a bid to further incentivise the scheme, the government has also doubled the accident insurance and relaxed the age criteria by five years. In its new form, the Jan Dhan Yojana will now have a relaxed age limit of 18-65 years for availing overdraft facility as against the earlier 60 years upper limit.

The scheme will have an overdraft limit of Rs 10,000, against the earlier Rs 5,000. Also, there will not be any conditions attached for overdraft up to Rs 2,000, the government statement said.

Reports inform that the decision was taken by the Union Cabinet on Wednesday. The government's official spokesperson on Wednesday had informed that the extension and respective changes were made to the Atal Pension Yojana. However, it issued a clarification on Thursday that it was, in fact, the National Mission for Financial Inclusion - Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana.

"Correction...The tweets mistakenly refer to Atal Pension Yojana. The facts instead pertain to Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana. We regret the error," the Press Information Bureau said. "Under the expanded coverage from 'every household to every adult', accidental insurance cover for new RuPay cardholders will be raised from Rs 1 lakh to Rs 2 lakh to new PMJDY accounts opened after August 28," it said.

The government said that so far, around 32.41 crore Jan Dhan accounts have been opened with more than Rs 81,200 crore of deposit balance. According to a report by IANS, out of those, 53 per cent account holders are women and 59 per cent are in rural and semi-urban areas and more than 83 per cent operative accounts (except states of Assam, Meghalaya, J&K) are Aadhaar seeded, with issuance of approximately 24.4 crore RuPay cards to these account holders, it said.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Sep 06, 2018 08:57 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).