One stop for all government schemes, Aadhaar

A committee of ministers headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is set to make Aadhaar integration must for executing every government scheme to ensure accountability and check corruption.

Updated on: Nov 20, 2012, 16:12:06 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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A committee of ministers headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is set to make Aadhaar integration must for executing every government scheme to ensure accountability and check corruption.

The central government disburses around Rs three lakh crore every year under 147 central schemes to the state governments. But, it does not have a system to check whether the money has been effectively used or not.

The unique identification or Aadhaar platform would provide government an opportunity to ensure electronic accountability systems. As of now, the central government is totally dependant on the state governments to find out how the central funds are used and does not have an effective mechanism to cross verify the claims.

“It can change with Aadhaar,” Nandan Nilekani chairman of Unique Identification Authority of India told HT recently. The reason is Aadhaar platform provides authentication to a particular service and when the central government leverages the service accountability would be automatic. “Pilots have shown that Aadhaar system works efficiently,” he added.

The Planning Commission, which coordinates the Prime Minister headed national committee on direct cash transfers, has received proposals from around 20 ministries to use Aadhaar platform to execute the schemes.

“All 15 flagship programmes and major government schemes would start using Aadhaar system in 51 districts from January next year,” a senior planning commission official said. This would be in addition to disbursing subsidies in these districts from next year.

An announcement in this regard is expected next week after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh takes first meeting of the national committee. Officials said additional allocations would be made in the supplementary grants to be approved in the winter session of parliament for digitizing the database and seeding it with Aadhaar numbers.

Based on the proposal submitted by the ministries, the technical committee would be fixing timelines for each ministry to deliver on Aadhaar platform to ensure that entire government spending is disbursed through Aadhaar platform by 2017. “The UPA-2 has given top priority to the unique identification scheme as a way to improve governance,” a senior government official said.

However, cash transfer of subsidies, fuel and ration, and financial incentives like pensions and scholarships, will happen by April 2014. The government has also announced a roadmap to transfer LPG subsidy directly into the bank accounts of beneficiaries and pilots for ration subsidies are underway.

The ultimate aim of the government is to make all disburse funds to state governments and residents through one payment bridge- Aadhaar- and it is likely to be stamped at PM’s meeting on November 26.

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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