DR ANUPAM SARAPH | 12/10/2015 04:05 PM |
The government claims that Aadhaar removes barriers to benefits, cleans duplicate and fraudulent beneficiaries and ensures benefits reach the beneficiaries. Are these claims justified?
The purposes of Aadhaar were laid out in the Government’s Strategy Document . Let us examine each of the purposes in turn. The Government asserts, “In India, an inability to prove identity is one of the biggest barriers preventing the poor from accessing benefits and subsidies.” More recently the UIDAI admitted that 99.97% of those now issued with Aadhaar numbers did not really need them because they were already in possession of adequate identification documents. If this is true, the inability to prove identity has not been the biggest barrier to access benefits.