Aadhar & PDS

Aadhar and functionality of PDS

  • Aadhaar as an identifier:
    • People belonging to marginalized sections of the society often do not have a valid proof of identity. As a result, they miss out on availing social benefits provided by the government. Aadhaar has been successful in solving this problem.
    • One of the quintessential properties of Aadhaar is its uniqueness. It is an identification that a person can carry for a life time and potentially use with any service provider thus, fundamentally becoming a pro-poor identification infrastructure.
  • It provides a single view of beneficiary data and information, aiding in streamlining policy decisions for the state
  • Social benefits delivery services:
    • Enables State Governments to directly transfer benefits to beneficiary accounts under various schemes.
  • Beneficiary Identification:
    • Helps in sanitizing the State’s/Department’s databases and uniquely identifying beneficiaries by removing ghost/duplicate identities
  • Demographic and development planning:
    • Enables valuable anonymized demographic data to help development planning at State, District and local government levels.
  • Preventing leakages:
    • Welfare programs, where beneficiaries need to be confirmed before service delivery, also stand to benefit from UIDAI’s verification service.
    • Examples of such usages include subsidized food and kerosene delivery to Public Distribution System (PDS) beneficiaries.
    • This usage would ensure that services are delivered to the right beneficiaries only.

Challenges

However, the use of Aadhaar-based biometric authentication (ABBA) in the public distribution system has its own share of challenges:

  • ABBA requires not only Aadhaar seeding, but also successful fingerprint authentication at the ration shop every month. That, in turn, requires a functional Point of Sale (PoS) machine, adequate connectivity, and reasonably smooth fingers. Despite some alleged safeguards, the system is far from perfect
  • Evidence from Jharkhand suggests that ABBA is of little use in reducing PDS corruption.
  • Neither seeding nor the ABBA can stop quantity fraud.
  • If PDS dealers give people less than their due, biometric authentication does not help.
  • Cases of deaths due to hunger as people could not collect rations because of a biometric mismatch at the PDS shop.
  • Disenfranchisement of the elderly and the disabled, as ABBA requires beneficiaries to visit the PDS outlet personally for fingerprint authentication.
  • Seeding issues:
    • When benefits are paid through Aadhaar-enabled means such as the Aadhaar Payments Bridge System (APBS), the first step is to seed the list of beneficiaries with the corresponding Aadhaar numbers. Seeding is a tedious operation and it has to be done each time a new scheme is inducted. Those who have failed to comply are simply removed from the lists
    • Seeding often creates inconsistencies between ration-cards database and the Aadhaar database.
    • Many poor people do not know the rules of Aadhaar seeding and biometric authentication.
  • Inclusion errors increase the financial burden of the state, exclusion errors can often leave poor families vulnerable to hunger.
  • Deprivation of poor:
    • Poor people often find themselves deprived of their rights in the process. For instance linking one’s pension or ration card or bank account with Aadhaar is a tedious process as data-entry errors are common.
    • And even without such errors, Aadhaar linking often fails because a person’s demographic details in the Aadhaar database do not match the corresponding details in her job card or ration card.
    • The government failed to address these issues as job cards, ration cards and pensions have been mass-cancelled in many states

Way forward

  • Inconsistencies need to be resolved for successful Aadhaar seeding.
  • It is essential to deal with issues of duplication, use less disruptive methods than Aadhaar such as food coupons, smart cards, and last-mile tracking
  • Using other technology to curb corruption like computerisation, SMS alerts, online availability of official records, toll-free help lines and so on.
  • It is imperative that the Union Government enact a privacy legislation that clearly defines the rights of citizens consistent with the promise of the Constitution.
  • The government should factor in privacy risks and include procedures and systems to protect citizen information in any system of data collection. It should create institutional mechanism such as Privacy Commissioner to prevent unauthorised disclosure of or access to such data.
  • Our national cyber cell should be made well capable of dealing with any cyber attack in shortest time.