KEDAR NAGARAJAN - Five SC Orders Later, Aadhaar Requirement Continues to Haunt Many
New Delhi: Despite five Supreme Court orders
since September 2013 stating that the Aadhaar card cannot be a mandatory
requirement for access to government services or subsidies, the
reality on the ground continues to remain very different. The point was underlined
at a press conference in Delhi yesterday where, besides lawyers and experts, a
resident of Yamuna Khadar, Delhi described how he was denied emergency
treatment in two public hospitals when he and his friend required it because
the friend did not have an Aadhaar card.
“In the ration system in Delhi, the UID project has been
used as a tool of exclusion,” said Anjali Bhardwaj of Satark Nagrik Sangathan.
Voices from the field spoke of how Aadhaar has emerged as a barrier to the
poor, especially women and children, accessing their entitlements. Ramlalli
from Lal Gumbad, Delhi had applied for a new ration card under the National
Food Security Act (NFSA). She explained that her children’s names were not
included in the ration card. She was told at the ration office that this was
because their Aadhaar cards were not submitted with the application. Under the
NFSA, entitlements have become individual, and due to the exclusion of her
children, Ramlalli’s family now does not receive adequate food grain.
Usha Ramanathan, law researcher,said the latest order of the
Supreme Court dated August 11 states that the Aadhaar card cannot be used
at all except for the purpose of the Public Distribution System (PDS) and LPG
allotment. “So, the CBSE or the UGC or banks or anyone else cannot ask for the
number at all. This is because the court recognised that voluntariness was
being used as a means of imposing a compulsion on people to enrol,” she said.
“If they ask for the number, they will be in contempt of the orders of the
Supreme Court,” she added.
Aside from the problem of exclusion through the UID project,
Gopal Krishna of the Citizens Forum for Civil Liberties (CFCL) said that the
status of the data collected through the UID project has been suspect from the
very start. “It is being held by companies of dubious provenance. A contract
has been signed between our government and large private companies, which says
they will hold the collected data for a period of seven years. Everyone knows
that if data is stored for even seven seconds, it can last forever,” he said.
Aruna Roy, one of the petitioners in the UID case before the Supreme Court,
added that by taking this issue lightly people were tacitly surrendering
their economic and social rights.
Providing statistics that contradict the claim that the
Aadhaar card is the solution for the economically disadvantaged, economist
Reetika Khera said, “Rather than being a tool of inclusion, it is fast becoming
a tool of exclusion.” In a reply to an RTI query it was learnt that only 0.03%
of people who got an Aadhaar card were people who had no ID before. Another
stated aim was that the UID would help end corruption in the PDS and the
National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. But it has been seen in the past few
years that leakages have been reduced without the use of Aadhaar, she said. In
Chhattisgarh, between 2004-5 and 2011-12, leakages came down from 50 to 10%,
and in Bihar from 90% to about 20% in the same period.
Duplication in the databases of welfare programs has also
been cited as a reason for the importance of Aadhaar. According to Khera,
however, for Direct Benefit Transfers (DBT) there is a requirement for people
to have bank accounts – making this claim void. Furthermore, according to the
Dhande Committee report on DBT for LPG, it was found that there were 2%
duplicate beneficiaries. A government affidavit submitted to the Supreme Court
suggested that there were 2% duplicate job cards in Andhra Pradesh. Khera
stated that according to a Public Evaluation of Entitlement Programmes (PEEP)
survey only one case of duplication was found from nearly 3800 beneficiaries on
pension lists from ten states.
The idea that the UID database is fool-proof was
shaken by a minister who stated in Parliament that more than nine crore
enrolment records in the UID program were rejected because of quality issues
and suspected fraud... Read more:
http://thewire.in/2015/09/19/five-sc-orders-later-aadhaar-requirement-continues-to-haunt-many-11065/
