 "Govt to sort out Aadhaar glitches")
The death of an 11-year-old girl in Jharkhand after her family was denied food because their ration card was not linked to Aadhaar has forced the Union government to come out with an alternative delivery mechanism for social welfare schemes.
The mechanism includes use of coupons, card-based offline transactions and one-time passwords sent to the mobile phones of beneficiaries for verification. The government will soon launch a few pilot projects to assess the viability of these new measures.
Currently, the Union government, which has made Aadhaar mandatory for all its social welfare schemes, is facing problems on two counts. First, there are beneficiaries who are yet to be provided with Aadhaar, a 12-digit unique identity number, or have not linked their Aadhaar with welfare schemes. Then there is a set of people who are either not receiving government subsidies because of connectivity issues or because their fingerprints do not match during the verification process.
“The authentication failure is around 13-15 per cent. Poor connectivity is responsible for 10 per cent of the cases. And in less than five per cent of cases, the biometrics of individuals did not match with the UIDAI database,” said an official who was privy to a review meeting in the Prime Minister’s Office last month.
This alternative mechanism is expected to remain in place till the time every panchayat in the country is provided broadband coverage. The government expects to complete this exercise by 2018. The official said the high-level meeting was called in the wake of the tragic death of an 11-year-old girl in Jharkhand on September 28. Her family had alleged that it was denied rations for months and their ration card was cancelled because it was not linked to Aadhaar. According to sources, Aadhaar seeding is less than 50 per cent in social welfare schemes related to food and fertilisers.
The mechanism includes use of coupons, card-based offline transactions and one-time passwords sent to the mobile phones of beneficiaries for verification. The government will soon launch a few pilot projects to assess the viability of these new measures.
Currently, the Union government, which has made Aadhaar mandatory for all its social welfare schemes, is facing problems on two counts. First, there are beneficiaries who are yet to be provided with Aadhaar, a 12-digit unique identity number, or have not linked their Aadhaar with welfare schemes. Then there is a set of people who are either not receiving government subsidies because of connectivity issues or because their fingerprints do not match during the verification process.
“The authentication failure is around 13-15 per cent. Poor connectivity is responsible for 10 per cent of the cases. And in less than five per cent of cases, the biometrics of individuals did not match with the UIDAI database,” said an official who was privy to a review meeting in the Prime Minister’s Office last month.
This alternative mechanism is expected to remain in place till the time every panchayat in the country is provided broadband coverage. The government expects to complete this exercise by 2018. The official said the high-level meeting was called in the wake of the tragic death of an 11-year-old girl in Jharkhand on September 28. Her family had alleged that it was denied rations for months and their ration card was cancelled because it was not linked to Aadhaar. According to sources, Aadhaar seeding is less than 50 per cent in social welfare schemes related to food and fertilisers.
