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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Aadhaar or else -Jean Dreze
-The Indian Express

In Jharkhand, ABBA was first made compulsory for PDS users in Ranchi district in August 2016. By June 2017, it was mandatory in about 80 per cent of the ration shops across the state. This meant, of course, that Aadhaar itself was compulsory — no Aadhaar, no food.

Recent events in Jharkhand shed some useful light on the damage done by compulsory biometric authentication in the Public Distribution System (PDS). This is increasingly a countrywide problem. The reason is that Aadhaar-based biometric authentication (ABBA) is being relentlessly pushed by the Central government, with little attention to the consequences.

In Jharkhand, ABBA was first made compulsory for PDS users in Ranchi district in August 2016. By June 2017, it was mandatory in about 80 per cent of the ration shops across the state. This meant, of course, that Aadhaar itself was compulsory — no Aadhaar, no food. But making ABBA compulsory for PDS users creates two more serious hurdles for them.

First, ABBA requires Aadhaar seeding. This means that PDS users must not only have an Aadhaar number, but also get this number correctly linked to their ration card. This is far from trivial. One difficulty, among others, is that seeding often creates inconsistencies between databases — in this case, between the ration-cards database and the Aadhaar database.

For instance, names may be spelt differently in the two databases. At least some of these inconsistencies need to be resolved for successful seeding. The middle class recently discovered the hassles of Aadhaar seeding in the context of the PAN-Aadhaar linkage. The problem is much worse for underprivileged people. Many of them depend heavily on middlemen, who extract a price at every step.

There is another difficulty with Aadhaar seeding. How is it to be achieved in good time, when people have no reason to hurry? The obvious way, also used by banks and telecom companies, is to set a deadline and threaten to discontinue benefits after that. If the deadline keeps getting postponed, however, the threat may not serve the purpose.

At some point, therefore, the threat needs to be carried out. That is what happened on March 27, when the Chief Secretary of Jharkhand ordered Aadhaar-less ration cards to be cancelled. As a result, large numbers of people found themselves excluded from the PDS for no fault of their own. To add insult to injury, the Government of Jharkhand claimed that the cancelled cards were fake. But recent verification exercises in three blocks (Khunti, Mahuadanr and Manika) confirm that most of the concerned cardholders are alive and eligible. In much the same way, job cards and even pensions have been cancelled en masse in Jharkhand for the sake of achieving 100 per cent Aadhaar seeding.

The second hurdle is monthly biometric authentication at the ration shop. This requires connectivity, a functional point of sale (PoS) machine, operational servers, and of course, successful fingerprint recognition. Official statistics and independent surveys point to high failure rates in Jharkhand — perhaps 10 to 20 per cent. The victims often come from vulnerable groups, such as elderly persons and manual labourers with rough fingerprints. Even those for whom ABBA eventually works, face much inconvenience, anxiety and waste of time.

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