Despite Supreme Court order, no wages without Aadhaar card in Rajasthan village
TILONIA (RAJASTHAN), October 3, 2013
Many MGNREGA workers in Tilonia village of Ajmer district are struggling to get their wages as they don’t have Aadhaar cards, this despite a recent Supreme Court order that said the unique IDs were not mandatory for accessing welfare schemes.
An order by the Postal Department in Ajmer, dated May 7, 2013, had instructed all sub-post masters to inform MNREGA workers that: “As per the orders of the Central/State government, after July 31, 2013, no payment would be made to MGNREGA accounts without an Aadhaar card.”
The order directed the workers to register their Adhaar numbers with their accounts. It said the workers would be themselves responsible for any inconvenience caused.
Soon after, the staff at the Tilonia post office started turning away workers who did not produce a copy of their Aadhaar cards.
“Well, we did not turn away everyone without an Aadhaar. We made payments to those workers who could at least produce their Aadhaar enrolment receipt, if not the card itself,” said Harkaran, the sub-post master.
When told about the Supreme Court order, he said he was aware of it but could not bypass the departmental order. “We have not received any new order, or even oral instructions, nullifying the previous order,” he said.Of the 5,000 MNREGA accounts at the Tilonia post office, only about a thousand are linked to Aadhaar. “The orders were strict. But I have to manage the situation here on the ground. I have been making payments to several account-holders based on my goodwill and personal relations,” the sub-post master said.
Dhaneshwari Devi, an auxiliary nurse midwife in Tilonia, has a similar arrangement with the beneficiaries of the Janani Suraksha Yojana, which provides cash incentives to pregnant women opting for institutional deliveries.
“We have been told the Aadhaar card is mandatory, but if the beneficiaries don’t have it, we don’t just turn them away. We work something out,” she said.
While this arrangement raises questions about the Aadhaar card’s necessity, it leads to the possibility of exclusion, resulting from the official’s subjectivity and bias.
“This illustrates two things. One, that it is possible to continue direct benefit transfers as long as people have bank or post office accounts. Two, while Aadhaar’s stated purpose was to reduce the power of middlemen [the post master in this case]; it is reinforcing their power in the intervening period when the accounts are seeded with the UID numbers. The government has created unnecessary confusion on the ground and added an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy,” said development economist Reetika Khera.
Kartar (35), a construction worker from Tilonia, has had a tough time getting his Aadhaar card made. “I went to the camps three-four times but was sent back every time. The babus asked me to apply cream on my palms and then come back. When it still didn’t work, they asked me to use mustard oil for some days but even then, the machine did not record my fingerprints,” he said.
Kartar said sarcastically that given the nature of his job, his palms don’t seem to have an “Aadhaar line”.