Read Editorial with D2G – Ep 524
Aadhaar as a hurdle: On authentication failures and welfare delivery
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Meanings are given in BOLD
The Supreme Court, on Wednesday, did the right thing by terming ( to describe somebody/something by using a particular word or expression ) as serious the allegation ( made without giving proof, that someone has done something wrong or illegal ) by a petitioner that three crore ration cards were cancelled for not being linked with the Aadhaar database and that these were connected to reported starvation ( suffering or death because there is not enough food ) deaths in some States.
The unique identification scheme has been in existence ( the state of existing ) for more than a decade and recent data has estimated that nearly 90% of India’s projected population has been assigned the Aadhaar number. Following the Court’s judgment in 2018, upholding the Aadhaar programme as a reasonable restriction on individual privacy to fulfil welfare requirements and dignity ( calm, serious behaviour that makes other people respect you ) — a 4-1 majority Bench had also rejected a review petition in January 2021 — questions about the scheme’s validity for public purposes have been put to rest.
But that has not meant that concerns about the failures in the use of the identity verification project have been allayed ( to make something less strong ). These include inefficiencies ( the state of not achieving maximum productivity; failure to make the best use of time or resources ) in biometric authentication and updating, linking of Aadhaar with bank accounts, and the use of the Aadhaar payment bridge. With benefits under the PDS, the NREGA and LPG subsidy, among other essentials, requiring individuals to have the Aadhaar number, inefficiencies and failures have led to inconvenience and suffering for the poor.
There are reports that show failures in authentication having led to delays in the disbursal ( the act of spending or disbursing money ) of benefits and, in many cases, in their denial ( a statement that something is not true ) due to cancellation of legitimate ( reasonable or acceptable ) beneficiary names. The government had promised that exemption ( the action of freeing or state of being free from an obligation or liability imposed on others ) mechanisms that would allow for overriding ( more important than any other considerations ) such failures will help beneficiaries still avail subsidies and benefits despite system failures.
That has been the response by the government to the recent petition as well, but reports from States such as Jharkhand from 2017, for example, suggest that there have been starvation ( suffering or death caused by lack of food ) deaths because of the denial of benefits and subsidies ( a sum of money granted by the state or a public body to help an industry or business keep the price of a commodity or service low ).
Biometric authentication failures are but expected of a large scale and technology-intensive project such as the UID. Despite being designed to store finger and iris scans of most users, doubts about the success rates of authentication and the generation of “false negatives” have always persisted ( continue in an opinion or course of action in spite of difficulty or opposition ), more so for labourers and tribal people.
Those engaged in manual and hard labour, for example, are susceptible ( easily influenced by ) to fingerprint changes over time. In practice, beneficiaries have tended to use Aadhaar cards as identity markers but there have been instances ( an example or single occurrence of something ) of people losing cards and being denied benefits. Given the scale of the problem, the central and State governments would do well to allow alternative identification so that genuine beneficiaries are not denied due subsidies. The question of fraud can still be addressed by the use of other verification cards and by decentralised disbursal of services at the panchayat level.
