Is Aadhaar the way for welfare payouts? - No
NIKHIL DEY
Going by the submission made in the ongoing Supreme Court case on the UID, the interim order seemingly reflects a consensus. The petitioner was asking the court to pass orders to ensure that Aadhaar was not made mandatory to get social sector benefits. The Government’s assertion was that it was entirely voluntary, and therefore there was no need for any interim order. The Supreme Court felt the need to state the obvious, and make it abundantly clear that it could not be made mandatory to receive benefits under social sector programmes.
This order has thrown the Aadhaar establishment and its supporters into a state of panic. That is because they understand that the only way people can be “persuaded” to join the long lines for Aadhaar cards is to make it clear that Aadhaar is a prerequisite to be a beneficiary. The only “achievement” of this unofficial coercion is a high enrolment figure. Evidence from the field is unequivocal that Aadhaar has given no additional benefit to any social sector beneficiary. The “voluntary” nature of this enrolment has so far been mythical.
Since the applicant is not being led by the rope to the enrolment centre, it is being termed voluntary; except that they cannot access entitlements like food, employment, cooking gas, or maternity benefits unless they are enrolled for the card. You have to be one of the beneficiaries of a scheme to really understand the mechanics of this technological tool.
Aadhaar is not really a card; it is a unique number that relates to biometric authentication. Therefore, its only unique value is when the biometric authentication works flawlessly, not only as a technology, but also as an administrative and vigilance mechanism.
Even in districts where direct benefit transfer rollouts are in place, for the tiny number of beneficiaries and schemes that have been taken up, Aadhaar is far from working. In most of the districts, many of the requisite milestones of financial inclusion are not in place. Pilot schemes in states where it is being tried show massive problems in efficacy, which is bound to result in either the exclusion of beneficiaries, or setting the system aside by using what is euphemistically called “manual override”. This in a centralised authentication system is a perfect prescription for leakage, and an acknowledgement of failure. There seem to be no answers to these failures except for the glib assertion that eventually all the glitches will go away.
The Supreme Court order and the rhetorical commitment to voluntariness must be strictly followed so that coercion and exclusion do not get set as state practice. If pilot projects, people’s experiences, and rigorous field-level evaluations indicate that the system will work, it can be adopted. If not, it should be allowed to sink before we waste more money and time on an impractical “magic bullet”.
(The author works with Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan.)
(This article was published on September 27, 2013)
Is Aadhaar the way for welfare payouts? - Yes
A. SRINIVAS
The Supreme Court is right in saying that an individual’s access to state transfers should not depend on whether he/she has an Aadhaar card. Not possessing this card should not be treated as some sort of offence. But if the court’s ruling ends up undermining the disbursal of Aadhaar cards, it would be most unfortunate.
The basic idea behind distributing the Aadhaar card is to facilitate direct and accurate transfer of welfare benefits — in food, fertiliser, pensions, scholarships, low-cost housing and cooking gas — to the bank account of the beneficiaries.
Aadhaar, with its biometric identification, can curb fraud arising out of diversion of such funds to ghost or duplicate beneficiaries. A November 2012 report on Aadhaar brought out by the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy estimates the leakages, essentially due to impersonation in 22 welfare schemes, at 7-12 per cent of the total subsidy of over Rs 300,000 crore. This is no small sum.
Therefore, a whole class of cheats, touts and rent-seekers would hate to see everyone getting an Aadhaar card.
Similarly, a number of bona fide, ordinary citizens struggling to receive their entitlements will wish for an Aadhaar card, once they know how much they stand to benefit.
The Government should implement Aadhaar with greater resolve, covering the entire population by 2018-19, as envisaged, if not earlier. More than 400 million have already been covered. Before full coverage, it should not insist on linking welfare payouts to the Aadhaar card (as attempted in the case of cash transfer of LPG subsidy); the Supreme Court is right here, as the citizen should not be penalised. But the petitioners have gone further — or rather, digressed — to question the merits of Aadhaar on flimsy grounds.
Fears of ‘illegal migration’, raised by the petitioner and the Home Ministry, are overblown. When residence proof and biometrics are taken into consideration, what’s the problem? Generally speaking, the ‘privacy’ argument lacks substance.
The state does not need Aadhaar to snoop into our lives. Besides, it is worth wondering whether an economy with such a low tax-to-GDP ratio needs more financial privacy or less. Therefore, the Supreme Court’s ruling on Aadhaar concerns itself with the modalities of disbursing subsidy rather than the petitioner’s exaggerated fears.
Aadhaar should indeed play a central role in subsidy payouts. It will ensure that millions of ordinary people get their entitlements without being harassed by intermediaries.
It is laudable that Aadhaar has been conceived as an unique card, rather than one that is restricted to a category of people, such as ration-card users, voters and taxpayers.
If Aadhaar brings fraudulent transactions to a stop and establishes a money trail, why complain?
Read also: Is Aadhaar the way for welfare payouts? - No
