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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | What's in a unique number? -Swati Narayan

What's in a unique number? -Swati Narayan

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published Published on Feb 13, 2017   modified Modified on Feb 13, 2017
-The Indian Express

Linking of Aadhaar to a growing number of government entitlements is misguided

LAST week the Union food ministry issued an unprecedented diktat. It has insisted that each family member must possess an Aadhaar number within four months, to be eligible for subsidised foodgrains under the National Food Security Act. This ties in with the larger plan for all ration shops by 2019 to verify Aadhaar biometrics at every transaction. So, not only must 210 million families possess unique numbers for each member, they must also queue up every month to prove their thumbprints. But does this make any logical sense?

First, the ration dealer can still give less grain than the printed receipt. Only in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu are electronic weighing scales connected to stem “quantity deception”. But they too work only when there is electricity. Besides, the greatest pilferage occurs from godowns, not ration shops.

Second, to weed out ghost cards and “identity fraud,” a one-time exercise to match ration cards with the population census would have been more than sufficient. Already, every single card nationwide has been digitised and two-thirds Aadhaar-seeded to purge 20 million fake cards.

Finally, if the aim was to ensure that unsold foodgrains are not siphoned off with “accounting dodges”, there are far simpler alternatives. Bihar’s barcoded coupons have reduced leakages from 91 to 24 per cent within six short years. Previously, Tamil Nadu had relied on offline handheld billing devices (similar to those with bus conductors). Andhra’s ration shops now use iris scanners, with a lower error rate than biometrics. Instead, the insistence on Aadhaar biometrics has already wreaked havoc. The Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan estimates that in the last few months, 38 per cent of households in Rajasthan have not been able to match fingerprints. In Madhya Pradesh, 20 per cent of devices have malfunctioned and have been returned to vendors. Similarly, in Jharkhand’s capital, at the outset almost half the cardholders were not able to prove their identity. Five hundred leprosy survivors without fingers in Ranchi were insensitively denied foodgrains for three months — for want of fingerprints.

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The Indian Express, 13 February 2017, http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/aadhaar-number-subsidised-foodgrains-national-food-security-act-whats-in-a-unique-number-4521285/


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