THE Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has decided to accept NREGS job cards or Aadhar letter as official documents for opening accounts in rural cooperative banks for persons covered under the scheme. This will enable the job card holders or the workers to keep their money is safe custody. An RBI communique to the state and district cooperative banks has said that the accounts can be opened with certain conditions attached as...

Madhya Pradesh has become the first state to link Aadhaar, the 12-digit number issued by UIDAI, to the subsidised foodgrain scheme. The state government thinks the new arrangement will totally eliminate fake beneficiaries of the subsidised foodgrain scheme. MP has cancelled lakhs of bogus ration cards over the last couple of years that were proving to be a drain on the public distribution system. Commissioner, Food and Civil Supplies, Ajit Kesari, who is...

Cash transfer as substitute for state service provision is a dangerous recipe for callously anti-poor and corrupt governance. THE staggering number of recent articles, papers and books on the virtues of giving cash in place of public services to the poor has created an impression that a sort of epidemic has broken out. Economists, policymakers, bureaucrats and newspaper commentators are all infected by it and are in turn infecting others. The central...

Amid technical and infrastructural constraints, Maharashtra has rolled out 1.2 million Aadhaars, but the beneficiaries have been able to make little use of these numbers Ashok Bhil, a 25-year-old graduate from Navalpur, 7 Km from Tembhli, is disappointed with the way the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) is rolling out Aadhaar in Maharashtra. Last September, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government chose Tembhli, a small village in the predominantly tribal Nandurbar...

This article documents and then examines the various benefits that, it is claimed, will flow from linking the Unique Identity number with the public distribution system and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. It filters the unfounded claims, which arise from a poor understanding of how the PDS and NREGS function, from the genuine ones. On the latter, there are several demanding conditions that need to be met in order...