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Nothing can happen without the individual's consent. If no transaction can take place without his consent, it empowers him, rather than taking away any right, they argue. "Aadhaar is a true foundation of what some people rightly call the 'India Technology Stack' of paperless, presence-less, cash-less and friction-less governance," says Ram Sewak Sharma, former director-general of UIDAI. For now, UIDAI is in talks with more government departments to adopt the platform for welfare schemes. It is also in talks with the state governments to adopt Aadhaar as a preferred platform for direct benefits transfer. Currently, the Aadhaar-enabled platform is being used to implement schemes such as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana, payments of pensions by the Centre, the states and the Employees' Provident Fund Scheme. It is also used by the public distribution system and for the distribution of cooking gas and kerosene subsidies. With a legislation in place now, the coverage is likely to be extended to other schemes. The government's focus on Aadhaar, however, has taken a toll on the National Population Register (NPR). The government has spent Rs 4,500 crore to compile the NPR, a precursor to a National Register for Indian Citizen which involves issuing a smart identity card as citizenship proof. According to the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2003, the Registrar General of India must create this citizens' register and issue identity cards after verifying documents and antecedents. To expedite the process, the government also allowed UIDAI to collect biometric and demographic details. Initially, UIDAI was tasked with de-duplicating NPR data and generating Aadhaar. It was also supposed to hand over the biometric data to NPR. The expansion of the scope of UIDAI resulted in a bitter turf war among the various arms of the government. The battle ended with the government on Tuesday notifying the Aadhaar Bill, but other issues remain. The Bill restricts UIDAI from sharing data with any government or private agency, which creates uncertainty about how NPR will get the biometric from UIDAI. In the one-billion enrolment, NPR's contribution is 280 million. Another challenge of the data collecting agency is to capture biometric and demographic details of the residents of the Northeast for overall inclusion. The progress here has been slow. For example, its penetration in Mizoram and Assam, where the influx of illegal Bangladeshi migrants is considered to be the highest, is less than five per cent.
TWISTS & TURNS IN A GAME OF NUMBERS 2009:
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