UIDAI gets Rs 3,450 cr booster shot

With a year left for elections, the UPA government is putting its best foot forward to ensure that its ambitious project — direct benefit transfer (DBT) — makes the maximum impact, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Apr 14, 2013, 01:29:12 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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With a year left for elections, the UPA government is putting its best foot forward to ensure that its ambitious project — direct benefit transfer (DBT) — makes the maximum impact. To expedite awarding of unique identification or Aadhaar numbers, the PMO last week approved Rs 3,450 crore for a target enrolment of 40 crore people in a year.

Even with the inflow of funds, it will be a daunting task since the unique identification authority of India (UIDAI) had been able to enroll only 20 crore people in its first two years.

The UIDAI project is the UPA’s bid to provide a unique identity number to each resident of India so it can directly transfer benefits and check leakages in government schemes. It would also result in better monitoring of central government schemes worth Rs 3,00,000 crore.

“We expect to see first real impact of Aadhaar based DBT by July-August this year when one-third of India’s districts (120) would be brought under electronic money transfer scheme,” a senior government official said.

Finance minister P Chidamabaram ruled out early elections saying that the UPA government wanted elections only after its ambitious DBT roll-out is completed by next March.

Government sources said that of the total amount sought, around Rs 2,700 crore would be allotted for quick enrollment and ensuring that Aadhaar letters reach people on time.

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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