After launching Aadhaar Programme in India in 2009, the Government of India issued directions for linking/seeding Aadhaar with various schemes so that benefits of the same accrue to the consumers or beneficiaries. Various centrally sponsored schemes are afloat in the country and many of these have linking/seeding with Aadhaar. Government recommended this linkage with some definite objectives like avoiding fake identification in Government and private database, eschewing duplication and establishing genuineness of status of beneficiary in different schemes. The most important objective is to do away with the intermediary, who usually keeps the lion’s share to himself. Keeping these positive aspects of the scheme in view, most of the States including our neighbours like Himachal Pradesh, Punjab and Rajasthan achieved almost over 90 per cent successful seeding of Aadhaar with the centrally sponsored schemes. However, our State again lagged behind neighbouring States. It has remained content with just about 3 per cent achievement of seeding Aadhaar. Some of the major schemes of the Central Government have Aadhaar seeding with Public Distribution System, Direct Benefit Transfer (LPG subsidy) named as PAHAL, Scholarship Schemes and Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme etc. These are very important schemes and their benefits accrue to a large number of people. It is unfortunate that the Jammu and Kashmir State continues to lag behind because of lack of interest from the concerned departments.
Take the case of Public Distribution System undertaken in our State by the CAPD. Preliminary inquiries pointed to a plethora of irregularities detected in the distribution system adopted by CAPD. Even after these detections, remedial measures are still hanging fire. The consumers report huge number of complaints of duplicate or fake cards. The Department has done very little to address these complaints, and plug the loopholes. With full Aadhaar seeding most of the complaints would have been avoided. According to official data, J&K has not made any progress in this regard until date. We have 1962463 beneficiaries and our record digitization performance has been 97.3%. However, as far as Aadhaar seeding with PDS is concerned, the performance is zero. Aadhaar seeding would ensure delivery of food entitlements to genuine persons and there remains no scope for a duplicate or a fake ration card. The second example is of Aadhaar based Direct Benefit Transfer aimed at directly transferring LPG subsidy into the accounts of the beneficiaries. J&K has achieved only 7.35% progress on LPG Aadhaar seeding mainly on the plea that at present people can get direct benefit transfer by linking bank account to the LPG number.
However, the adjoining States have made 70% to 92% progress in this regard as unlike J&K they wanted to make optimum use of the Aadhaar card for transparency. Again, Aadhaar Enabled Payment System in MGNREGA-a vital scheme for rural development in the country– J&K is lagging behind all the adjoining States. As against 92% to 99%, progress achieved by Haryana, Himachal and Punjab in Aadhaar seeding with MGNREGA, J&K has registered only 3.08% progress.
However, the Chief Secretary has taken a serious note of this situation and has conveyed to all departments to take urgent steps of Aadhaar seeding so that benefits of the scheme accrue to larger number of people in the State. If the Government is serious about this matter, it should be possible to have 100 per cent Aadhaar seeding within a short period.
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