Hunger in times of Aadhaar

This week, both the government and Opposition claimed that the Supreme Court verdict on Aadhaar vindicated their opposing standpoints on it. Few, if any, were aware that this week also marked the first death anniversary of a little girl whose family couldn’t get their food entitlements as their Aadhaar number hadn’t yet been seeded with the household ration card. Eleven-year-old Santoshi died on September 28 in Jharkhand, her final request for rice going unheeded by her desperate family. “Her last words were bhat, bhat,” her mother Koyli Devi had told us, months after her daughter’s death. “My daughter was not sick, she simply died of hunger,” Devi had said. 

 
As per the Right to Food Campaign, 56 hunger deaths were reported between 2015 and 2018, of which 42 happened in 2017-18. Campaign activists aver that many of these deaths occurred because of Aadhaar-based exclusions. In March 2018, I had attended a public hearing on the National Food Security Act (2013), where I found that Aadhaar-based exclusions have rendered entire communities vulnerable — be they the homeless and migrants who can’t furnish address proof, the transgender community whose gender listed on the ration/voter card does not match their current gender affiliation and the multitudes whose fingerprints simply do not match the data on the biometric database for reasons ranging from connectivity issues to age-related changes in biometric measurements.

 
I met the family of Etwariya Devi of Jharkhand. Her daughter-in-law recounted how in October 2017, they couldn’t draw ration as their biometrics didn’t match. The following month, the dealer said there was no supply. In December, the point of sale machine wasn’t working. On Christmas, 2017, she starved to death. Another person I met was Asmi, a 67-year-old, severely disabled homeless person in Delhi who begs for a living. Being homeless, he hasn’t been able to provide any address proof to get an Aadhaar Card, and consequently, a ration card.
 

The list of such exclusions is depressingly endless and makes me wonder why SC did not read down Section 7 of the Aadhaar Act, which makes access to welfare schemes contingent on the production of Aadhaar. It has left the most vulnerable sections of society at the mercy of a technology from which all kinks haven’t yet been ironed out. Yet, it hasn’t addressed many other irregularities plaguing the government welfare schemes — poor quality of food grain; erratic supply; non-issuance of ration cards; irregular disbursal of pensions and scholarships and so on. Moreover, it has rendered food, shelter, pension and other necessities out to be dole — not inalienable rights of all Indian citizens. 

 
For me, however, the most crucial criticism of the mandatory linking of Aadhaar to welfare schemes is its punitive focus on being a “foolproof” way to weed out bogus beneficiaries from the actual ones (the government statistics on the number of bogus beneficiaries includes all those whose biometrics haven’t matched for any reason).
 
The question to ask is this: What price are we as a society willing to pay, to weed out phony beneficiaries from the country’s public distribution system? I think there’s only one answer: Let a thousand “fake” beneficiaries steal from the system, than have a single Santoshi die, crying for bhat in her final moments —  simply because her Aadhaar and ration card weren’t linked.