Letters: Wrong foundation

The editorial "A jolt for Aadhaar" (February 4), as do all discussions on this topic, does not reflect the fact that Aadhaar was meant to provide a proof of identity, and it has been successful in doing so to over 550 million of our population. Trying to position Aadhaar as a magic wand rather than just one of the enablers for complex issues such as financial inclusion, and elimination of subsidies reflects on the laziness and unwillingness of our government to do the real hard work.

Also, Govindraj Ethiraj's article "Has Aadhaar lost its foundation?" does injustice by assuming that the LPG subsidy programme linked to Aadhaar is a good foundation. This was a bad demonstrative application picked for "quick wins" collectively by politicians and technocrats. All that was required was for oil marketing companies (OMCs) to do differentiated billing based on consumer data, and the subsidy could have been refunded by the government to the OMCs. Rather, this was complicated by introducing direct subsidies to consumers - which is only relevant when consumers are free to choose their service providers (including private gas companies).

Balasubramanian S Bangalore

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