*CS takes serious note, asks deptts to improve performance
Mohinder Verma
JAMMU, Oct 3: Jammu and Kashmir is lagging behind the adjoining States in achieving the objective of Aadhaar despite the fact that it plays vital role in checking fake beneficiaries of various schemes of the Government of India besides putting an end on large number of duplicate and fake identities in Government and private databases.
Official sources told EXCELSIOR that 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 could percolate directly to the beneficiaries and middle-men system is checked.
Though many States in North India made remarkable achievements in 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, Jammu and Kashmir continued to lag behind because of lack of interest from the concerned departments.
The seeding of Aadhaar with Public Distribution System was mooted as this can be a potent tool for the Government in making the PDS more effective and ensuring delivery of food entitlements to the genuine persons.
Since no resident can have a duplicate Aadhaar card because of it being linked with individual biometrics, using Aadhaar to identify beneficiaries in PDS database can eliminate duplicate and fake beneficiaries from the rolls and make identification for entitlements far more effective.
However, according to the official data available with EXCELSIOR, J&K has not made any progress in this regard till date. J&K has 1962463 beneficiaries and its record digitization performance has been recorded at 97.3%. But as far as Aadhaar seeding with PDS is concerned, the performance is zero.
As compared to J&K, adjoining States of Punjab, Haryana, Himachal and Union Territory of Chandigarh have achieved 33% to 100% progress in this area.
Like PDS, Aadhaar based Direct Benefit Transfer is 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.
Similarly, on Aadhaar Enabled Payment System in MGNREGA, 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.
Against 1035974 job card holders, J&K has seeded only 31879 cards with Aaadhar despite the fact that Aadhaar number issued by Unique Identity Authority of India (UIDAI) is being used as a tool for de-duplication of beneficiary records so as to eliminate fake/ ‘ghost’ beneficiaries from Government databases.
“The poor performance in Aadhaar Enabled Payment System in MGNREGA is notwithstanding the fact that there are huge number of complaints in bungling in payments under this flagship scheme of the Union Ministry of Rural Development, which guarantees 100 days of wage employment in a financial year to every rural household whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work”, sources said.
As far as scholarship schemes are concerned, J&K didn’t initiate any step for Aadhaar seeding on the pretext that Supreme Court has recently made it clear that Aadhaar cards are not mandatory for social security schemes. However, the adjoining States achieved 90% to 100% progress in this regard because they wanted to ensure complete transparency in the database.
According to the sources, the poor performance of J&K in Aadhaar seeding has been viewed seriously by the Chief Secretary, B R Sharma, who has issued directions to the concerned departments for improvement on this issue. He has also desired to conduct detailed review in this regard in near future to check the performance of the departments.
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