6064 - Aadhaar drive for LPG link - Telegraph India

Aadhaar drive for LPG link

PIYUSH KUMAR TRIPATHI

A voter gets her retina scanned during Aadhaar card registration drive in Patna on Saturday. Picture by Nagendra Kumar Singh Patna, Nov. 22: The state rural development department will launch a massive drive from first week of December to enrol around eight crore people — four-fifth of the state’s population — for Aadhaar cards in seven months. Around 1,200 camps, including permanent enrolment centres, are expected to be set up across the state for this mammoth task. The move comes as huge respite for those seeking benefits under a number of welfare schemes linked to direct benefit transfer (DBT) project of the Union government. The Centre recently made Aadhaar number mandatory criteria to receive cash subsidy under the direct benefit transfer for LPG (cooking gas) from January 1, 2015. It is after a gap of two years and eight months that the rural development department would be enrolling residents for Aadhaar under the scheme. Senior officials from Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) claimed that the daily enrolment for Aadhaar would reach up to six lakh with the rural development department taking up the job. “As of now, around 2.25 crore people in Bihar have been enrolled for Aadhaar along with registration of their biometric details. With the rural development department, the state registrar, taking up the enrolment exercise, we expect the number of biometric registration machines to increase from around 3,500 at present to nearly 12,000. As a result, the average daily enrolment is expected to rise from 1.75 lakh at present to around 6 lakh,” said P.K. Upadhyay, assistant director-general, regional office, Ranchi, UIDAI. The state rural development is also in the advanced stages for setting up the camps for Aadhaar enrolment. Deliberating on the progress having been made in this regard, Kanak Bala, officer-on-special duty (OSD)-in-charge Aadhaar enrolment told The Telegraph today that the contract for setting up the camps in 12 districts, including Madhubani, Gaya, Vaishali and Bhojpur, has already been awarded to firms selected during the bidding process. “The work order has been issued to the selected firms and we expect them to start setting up the enrolment camps from first week of December. While a few of the camps would be permanent enrolment centres, we would be spreading awareness about the temporary camps as well through advertisement in newspapers and other publicity sources,” said Kanak. Earlier, the UIDAI, in a statement released from New Delhi on November 18, claimed that over 2 crore Aadhaar numbers have been generated in Bihar of a total population of 10.41 crore (as per census 2011). From February 2012 till April this year, Aadhaar enrolment in Bihar was being done under the national population register (NPR).