By The New Indian Express
Published: 31st January 2015 06:00 AM
Prime minister Narendra Modi has asked banks to link all Jan Dhan Yojana bank accounts to Aadhaar.
The NDA government has also decided to implement 33 central schemes identified by the NITI Aayog through the direct benefit transfer route using the Aadhaar platform. This is encouraging because going by government claims, 99.74 per cent of all households have been covered. Earlier, the BJP had opposed the Aadhaar project on the plea that it lacked Parliament’s approval, invaded the right to privacy and could be used to legitimise illegal immigration. Now that it has decided to use the platform for direct benefit transfers in almost all the schemes, it must address these issues and bring a new legislation for Parliament’s approval. It must also ask the Supreme Court to vacate its stay on the government’s move to make Aadhaar mandatory for availing benefits of welfare schemes and put UIDAI under the administrative control of some ministries after the dissolution of Planning Commission, under which the UPA government had put it.
It is indeed a good idea to bring the UIDAI under the ministry of communications and information technology. The IT ministry is the administrative ministry for the Digital India programme and has succeeded in displaying the efficiency of Aadhaar-based identification model by developing the attendance maintenance system for central government employees and is in the process of linking it with police and land records and voter ID cards. Bringing both Aadhaar and Digital India under the same roof will synergize the government effort.
In a letter to bankers Modi said recently there is a need to build on this success and leverage these accounts to provide citizens a wide range of credit, insurance and pension services. We also need to maintain high standards of customer service which the prime minister promised in the next phase of the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana. But this success must not lead to complacency.