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BASANT KUMAR MOHANTY
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The “direct benefit transfer” could be implemented from January across half the country — in those 300 of India’s 625 districts where 70 per cent of residents have Aadhaar or National Population Registrar (NPR) numbers.
Eastern states like Bengal and Odisha are poorly represented in the list. Only four Bengal districts — Hooghly, Murshidabad, Malda and Howrah — have made the cut. None have from Assam and Bihar.
Some 37 districts from Madhya Pradesh, 27 from Tamil Nadu, 24 from Jharkhand and 20 from Haryana are on the list.
A worker’s bank or postal account will be “seeded” with his or her Aadhaar or NPR number. This means the account details will be linked electronically to the holder’s Aadhaar or NPR number and biometric details such as fingerprints and iris impression.
The worker can go to the bank and withdraw the money, or the bank’s business correspondents can deliver the wage at the worker’s doorstep after verifying his or her identity with the help of portable equipment called micro-ATMs.
Rural development secretary L.C. Goyal told The Telegraph that Aadhaar-seeding will not be mandatory for the direct benefit transfer —wages will also be credited to accounts that are not Aadhaar-seeded.
“Aadhaar-seeding is not mandatory but is desirable — it will check fraud in payment,” Goyal said.
About 80 per cent of the job scheme’s workers now receive their wages in their accounts while the rest are paid in cash, mostly in remote and hilly areas. But the system is blighted by large-scale corruption and delayed wage payments.
Since biometric verification of identity is seen as more reliable than signatures or thumb impressions in rural India, an Aadhaar-based payment system is expected to check fraud and delays.
Besides, the workers can then receive their wages at home through the business correspondents of banks.
There are sceptics, however. “The government had experimented with direct transfer of the fuel subsidy in Ajmer district, Rajasthan, on a pilot basis. It failed,” said social activist Nikhil Dey.
In Ajmer, the business correspondent system remained the weak link.
Besides, “the way the government is pushing direct transfer”, Dey said, “it seems that Aadhaar-seeding will, in effect, be mandatory”.
“They can’t make it mandatory. The Supreme Court has said that Aadhaar is voluntary,” he said.
Verification of identity though biometric data is not foolproof, Dey argued: the fingerprints of many older people are not very clear and they may face problems.
The state governments have been asked to start a campaign so that workers with Aadhaar or NPR numbers can request their bank or the post office to go for seeding before the end of the year. Also, workers who lack a bank or postal account can get one.
“I doubt if all the accounts can be seeded with Aadhaar or NPR details by December,” Goyal said. If too many workers’ accounts remain un-seeded, he said, the launch could be delayed “by a few months”.
Only 36 per cent of the accounts of the 5.5 crore rural job scheme workers in the 300 chosen districts are seeded with Aadhaar or NPR details.
The Odisha districts that have made the cut are Balangir, Nayagarh, Puri, Nuapada, Gajapati, Dhenkanal, Cuttack and Khorda.
A Comptroller and Auditor General report, tabled in Parliament in April last year, had highlighted the various kinds of irregularities that infected the rural job scheme.
The scheme seeks to provide up to 100 days’ unskilled but paid labour to every rural household in a year.
