Nikhil Dey & Aruna Roy - Excluded by Aadhaar
Sita of Karkala
village, Lassadiya Panchayat, was one of many who spoke at the annual MKSS
Mazdoor Mela in Bhim on May 1. “I have no Aadhaar card, I don’t know why they
say my fingerprints don’t show. Without Aadhaar, I am denied work under the
MGNREGA, and get no rations. I am a single woman, and have no other source of
income. What will I eat, and how will I survive?” she said. Her anaemic
condition is apparent, and she should be classified as a gross administrative
failure, triggering emergency corrective action. But for the ruling elite in
Delhi and Jaipur, she is just a digit — one more, or one less in a policy
framework they are determined to impose for their own ends.
There are many women
who share Sita’s anguish. Though already enrolled in Aadhaar, “voluntarily” as
the government would have it, the biometric eco-system, for one reason or
another, has failed to authenticate them, denying them access to rations,
pensions, work. They speak with the pain and frustration of having repeatedly
and unsuccessfully tried to get the rations due to them. Their words carry the
clarity of experience and analysis that comes from being the object of a mass
experiment where exceptions and exclusions are diabolically counted as proof of
success. It doesn’t seem to matter to policymakers that rations, or pensions,
so basic and vital to survival, are denied. Their numbers have reached Jaipur
and Delhi, to be grandly proclaimed as the “frauds”, the “dead”, the “bogus”,
and the “duplicate people”, successfully eliminated by the government,
resulting in saving large sums of money.
This is Aadhaar in
welfare: A vast mechanism that is turning the government’s dismal failure to
deliver into a means of erasing a large number of people. It is part of a new
war on poverty, where, instead of eliminating hunger, it is an elimination of the
poor and the destitute. The ringmasters in Delhi have found a digital whip that
can do no wrong. Unfortunately, many
people still do not understand that the “Aadhaar card” is no card. The
government rests all the tall claims of Aadhaar on positive biometric
authentication, which even the UIDAI admits is their only reliable service. The
challenge of capturing and authenticating on a central server millions of
biometric transactions daily gives rise to a host of failures because of
biometric mismatch, poor internet connectivity, and machine malfunction. The
ration dealer holds the trump card as he knows just how to (mis)represent even
a positive answer. The beneficiary is left to carry the blame for all these
lacunae, and suffer the karma of exclusion. The numbers being
excluded are staggering. .. read more:
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