Aadhaar’s Progress: Plumbing for Better Public Service Delivery

The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), attached to the Planning Commission, is engaged in providing residents of India a Unique Identification number (called Aadhaar) linked to the resident’s demographic and biometric information. The project aims to create a platform that serves as an ‘identification infrastructure’ for delivery of public and private services to the residents of India. The Aadhaar project is set to become the largest biometric capture and identification project in the world.

Aadhaar has huge potential for improving operations and delivery of services. Its potential applications in various significant public service delivery and social sector programs are as follows:

PDS: India’s PDS with a network of 4.78 lakh fair price shops (FPS) is perhaps the largest retail system of its type in the world. The PDS is operated under the joint responsibility of the central and the state Governments. By using Aadhaar it is possible to have the subsidy go directly to the target households who can then purchase their food from any PDS store or maybe even non-PDS shops. The PDS system stands to benefit from Aadhaar in several ways:

1. Better Identification and Beneficiary Mobility – Integration with the UID programme will lead to better identification of individuals and families making possible better targeting and increased transparency. Further, an individual who migrates to some other part of the country can easily continue to avail of his designated benefits.
2. Offtake Authentication – The UID database will maintain details of the beneficiary that can be updated from multiple sources. The PDS system can use this database for authentication of beneficiaries.
3. Duplicate and Ghost Detection – The UIDAI will provide a detection infrastructure to the PDS programme to weed out duplicate and ghost cards.
4. Support for PDS reform – The UID will become an important identifier in banking services. This can support PDS reform by, for example, providing the banking account number for a family to effect direct cash transfer.

Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS): Incorporation of the UID into the MGNREGS programme will assist in addressing some of the major challenges that impede progress:

1. Payment of Wages - The UID can replace the need to provide supporting documentation for the standard Know Your Customer (KYC) fields, making opening a bank account significantly simpler.
2. Ghost Beneficiaries – Once each citizen in a job card needs to provide his UID before claiming employment, the potential for ghost or fictitious beneficiaries is eliminated.
3. Beneficiary Management – The UID system will provide a platform for managing citizens who relocate or migrate from one place to another and want to seamlessly enjoy benefits of the programme.
4. Social Audit - The village-level social audit committee can be selected after authentication with the UID database. The social audit reports filed by the village-level committees can be authenticated by the biometrics of the committee members and social audit coordinator.

Public health: Health, and health-related development schemes, could benefit from the UID. Public health in India is seeing a revolution in terms of

(1) greater commitment towards government financing of public and primary health care,

(2) pressure to meet the millennium development goals (MDGs), and

(3) consequent creation of large supply platforms at national level such as the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) and Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY).

What would be the public health associated pay-off from the application of the UID? Routine health information systems that capture and track the morbidity and mortality due to various disease conditions are critical to improving public health outcomes including life expectancy. Currently infrequent national or state surveys are the major mode of capturing data on infectious disease conditions. However, chronic or lifestyle diseases are not captured in any meaningful way even through surveys.

An integrated routine health system that can capture and track population-level disease conditions by linking citizen IDs with hospital or other medical facility records generated through facility visits can

(1) inform the public health system of the prevalence of various routine disease conditions and

(2) help prepare the health system to respond to unforeseen epidemics. A partial example of (1) can be seen under the Rajeev Arogyasri insurance scheme in Andhra Pradesh.

Education: Currently the primary education system in our country faces a serious problem of inflated enrolment at school level. This results in significant leakages and serious implementation problems. Leakages occur in various areas, including mid-day meals, books, scholarships, provision of uniforms and bicycles. If UIDs are given to children, it will do away with the problems of multiple enrolments and ghosts. Provision of UIDs will ensure that there are no problems due to migration of students anywhere within the country as one would have no difficulty in establishing one’s identity at the new location. It will effectively address the issue of education of children of migrant labourers as their children can be admitted at new places, without cumbersome verification.

Source: Economic survey