Aadhaar-based cash transfer in 51 districts

The government will launch direct cash transfer in 51 districts from 1 January and cover the entire country by April 2014, just ahead of the next Lok Sabha elections.

Updated on: Nov 10, 2012, 01:02:46 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The government will launch direct cash transfer in 51 districts from 1 January and cover the entire country by April 2014, just ahead of the next Lok Sabha elections.

The Prime Minister’s Office on Friday cleared the roadmap to implement the UPA-2’s ambitious project that could see the government crediting nearly Rs. 2,000 billion --- around 40 % of Centre’s plan budget -- straight into bank accounts of millions of beneficiaries of government schemes across the country.

Cash transfer will include a wide ambit of welfare measures from food and fuel subsidy to financial entitlement such as scholarships and pensions. The transfer will take place through Unique Identification or Aadhaar based biometric authentication system to ensure that the right person gets the money into his or her bank account.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress President Sonia Gandhi on October 20 initiated pilot projects to test the Aadhaar authenticated electronic cash transfer mode for different government schemes.

“All government departments engaged in transferring benefits to individual beneficiaries will quickly move to an electronic direct cash transfer system based on Aadhaar payment bridge,” a PMO statement issued after a meeting chaired by Principal Secretary to PM Pulok Chaterrjee with officials of different ministries said.

To meet the ambitious deadline, majority of Indian residents will need to have a bank account and Aadhaar number of end of 2013. As of now, half of 1.2 billion Indians have a bank account and Aadhaar number has been issued just 21 crore residents.

Chatterjee issued directions to the Department of Financial Services and to achieve universal financial inclusion and Nandan Nilekani led Unique Identification Authority of India to roll out Aadhaar speedily in line with the road map decided.

“It is a challenge we will achieve,” a senior UIDAI official said confidentially and adding that the authority was generating over a million Aadhaar numbers every day.

For a smooth roll-out of the world’s biggest transparency linked governance initiative, the government has also decided that electronic money transfer will take place in areas having 80 % or more coverage of Aadhaar numbers. There are about 100 such districts in India including all in Delhi and Tripura.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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