UIDAI SAYS THEY HAVE NO RECORD OF HOW MANY PEOPLE HAD IDS BEFORE

Even as the Centre makes Aadhaar necessary for more and more services, a primary need cited behind its push seems to have no real basis. In 2015, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), revealed in an RTI reply to Ujjainee Sharma, a researcher at Indian School of Business, that only 2.1 lakh people had enrolled under Aadhaar using ‘introducers’.

This meant that under one per cent of the people did not possess any form of identification before Aadhaar. The introducer system was put in place for applicants without any ID, who could enrol through an ‘introducer’ who authenticates his credentials.

Sharma says, “The RTI response basically challenges one of the biggest claims that Aadhaar card would be the first proper government recognised identification for many. And without it, millions of people were being excluded from various schemes.”

Next year she posed the same query. Only six more people had used the ‘introducer’ system between April 2015 and September 2016. This year in July, responding to the same RTI query, UIDAI stated that “no such information is compiled / published / readily available at present”.

Muniya Devi, 23, from Bari village, about 90 km away from Ranchi, gave birth to her third child – Lalchand, three months ago. But within a week , she was making a train journey with her husband and children to neighbouring Daltonganj to find work.

While she and her husband broke stones at a construction site for ~200 a day, her eldest son looked after the youngest.they stayed there for two months to earn enough to survive the next few. “There was no other work in the village,” she says quietly. For unlettered and landless families living in remote villages, NREGA work has often been a lifeline. But when that dries up, they must move out.

With Lalchand slung on her tiny waist, she shows me her NREGA job card. According to the manual entry on the card, she last worked in December 2012 under the scheme. But it wasn’t only the lack of work that was the problem. Muniya’s card had been struck off the NREGA list in 2014 and the reason listed was “wants to surrender card”. Muniya stares perplexedly when I tell her. She has no idea when or how that happened. “We are not educated so I don’t know all this,” she mumbles.

James Herenz, of Jharkhand NREGA Watch, alleges that large-scale deletions happened when the state started linking Aadhaar with job cards. “To complete 100 per cent seeding of job cards with Aadhaar, those who didn’t have Aadhaar were simply struck off the list citing various reasons.” Almost two dozen villagers HT met from Bari had their names struck off with no knowledge of it. Total deletions from the village stood at 417. These deletions are important as the Centre has often cited that Aadhaar seeding with NREGA has helped to weed out fake or ghost beneficia- ries. But ground reality suggests that many who lost their job cards were eligible for the scheme.

In April 2017, it was reported that the government had deleted over 90 lakh ‘fake’ job cards nationally. Verification involved checking the Aadhaar numbers of beneficiaries. But when economist Jean Dreze filed an RTI with the rural development ministry, only four per cent of the deletions turned out to be fake. Reetika Khera, economics professor at IIT Delhi says, “The focus on Aadhaar-linking in NREGA is a diversionary tactic, ignoring real problems such as difficulty in getting work, delayed wages and low wages.”

For Jharkhand, the RTI numbers show a similar trend. Of the 1.08 lakh deletions, only 2,675 were fake and 13,455 were duplicate. State NREGA commissioner, Siddharth Tripathi admitted that there were problems in the initial seeding exercise. “At that time there was no verification, only collection of Aadhaar data.” To rectify the problems of the first, the state launched a second drive. “Last August, we spent two months linking both Aadhaar and bank accounts to job cards. We helped people who didn’t have them to make new ones. Then, we ran a campaign in every ward to verify these,” says Tripathi.

The new exercise has resulted in deletion of 3.5 lakh cards. However, the department was unable to provide a breakdown of how many of these were fake and how many were deleted for other reasons.

Khera thinks the problem lies elsewhere, “Aadhaar can reduce ‘identity fraud,’ but the government has failed to honestly answer whether identity fraud is the disease that ails welfare schemes. Welfare needs Aadhaar like a fish needs a bicycle.”