Govt readies rollout with collectors' meeting

The government today initiated the process for implementation of Aadhaar-based cash transfer in 43 districts from January 1 with a preparatory meeting attended by the respective collectors.

A senior official in the know of the proceedings said Finance Minister P Chidambaram, Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) Nandan Nilekani, and Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister Pulok Chatterji attended the meeting. “Detailed presentations were done on the architecture and implementation strategy in the meeting,” said the official.

Another official who attended the meeting said that issues of digitising databases, seeding them with Aadhaar numbers, opening and linking of bank accounts, and micro ATM deployment were discussed.

The problems associated with the linkages in the whole system involving banks and banking correspondents were also analysed with the strategy to deal with them, said both the officials.

While there were “no constraints” for the rollout, one of the officials explained that the implementation would start from January 1 and will “progressively expand” thereafter. “There were no reservations about the system,” he added. It has been decided at the meeting that implementation of cash transfer from January 1 would be taken in mission mode with the implementation road map discussed in today’s meeting.