Government asks UIDAI, census office to match database with beneficiary lists of schemes

NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi has backed the UPA’s Aadhaar programme for now, but that may not be the final word on whether it will be retained.
The government has asked the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), which runs Aadhaar, and the census office under the home ministry to test their databases against beneficiary lists of schemes such as the LPG subsidy programme as well as documents such as passports to determine which one is more accurate, said senior government officials aware of the development. “Line ministries in charge of different schemes like education subsidy, LPG cylinders and identity documents such as passports, have been requested to share data to enable this matching exercise,” said one of the officials.

The census office is building the National Population Register or NPR by capturing biometrics and photographing residents. The Manmohan Singh government had assigned Aadhaar and NPR to specific states for enrollment.

On July 5, the PM chaired a meeting to consider the future of the two projects and is learnt to have backed expansion of UID enrollments in 300 districts where around 80% of the population have Aadhaar numbers. This would enable a re-launch of direct benefits transfer for the poor eligible for subsidies and benefits offered under schemes such as the rural jobs programme.

The UPA had put such transfers backed by Aadhaar on hold in January after widespread complaints about operational problems at the ground level.

Many beneficiaries were denied benefits as they didn’t have Aadhaar numbers, while those who did faced cash-flow problems as they were required to pay the full price for LPG cylinders and then wait for the subsidy to reach their bank accounts.

Matching names could prove to be a challenge for UIDAI, which has sought the Modi Cabinet’s nod for expanding enrollment in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Chhattisgarh and Uttarakhand at a cost of Rs 1,265 crore. In a recent exercise with the rural development ministry, UIDAI could only match 30% of names in its database with beneficiaries of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme or MGNREGS.

Moreover, it had enrolled and generated Aadhaar numbers that exceeded the population in several districts, raising concerns about the quality of verification procedures. UIDAI did not respond to a detailed questionnaire from ET. A senior rural development ministry official confirmed that its database comparison exercise with Aadhaar threw up significant anomalies.

After seeding a part of its MGNREGS database with Aadhaar numbers, the ministry had sent the details of beneficiaries to the UIDAI for validation. “The UIDAI had to check that its database had the same name linked to the number, but we found that just 30% of the names matched,” the official said, adding that the mismatches often arose due to names being spelt differently in both lists. That the MGNREGS databases and job cards issued in states list workers’ names in the local language added to the complexity.

The UIDAI is now trying a new approach for matching the rural employment guarantee list — phonetic comparisons of the two databases. For this, names in the MGNREGS beneficiary list and the Aadhaar number list have to be converted into audio files and then compared.