| Aadhaar shackles on smart cards ANANYA SENGUPTA New Delhi, April 17: A PMO directive to link all government welfare schemes to the Aadhaar card and avoid issuing separate smart cards for them has put several ministries in a spot. The directive, in the form of a letter to the information and technology ministry, came after Parliament passed the Aadhaar bill last month. By then, several ministries had already worked out the modalities to issue smart cards for their schemes. The social justice and empowerment ministry was gearing to roll out unique identity cards for the disabled, promised more than a year earlier, in two months. It's now contemplating linking the I-cards to the Aadhaar number. "When these I-cards were planned, it was not mandatory for the disabled to have Aadhaar numbers to apply for them. After the directive, it's likely that this will be made mandatory. So, in effect, only those with the Aadhaar number can get their I-cards," a ministry official said. "This will invariably delay the process. We are still deciding whether we should link it to Aadhaar immediately or do it in a phased manner." Sources said the ministry had already developed the software for the cards and floated tenders for printing them. The pilot project for the I-cards is likely to begin in two months in Ratlam, Madhya Pradesh, after which they will be issued in a phased manner starting with 12 states. "Our I-card project will continue as Aadhaar does not incorporate the information we need to create a database of the disabled," the official said. "We were told the Aadhaar card cannot reflect the specifics of disability or the pension schemes and scholarships for the disabled. So the best way is to link the I-card to Aadhaar." But the health ministry, planning since January to roll out an expanded version of the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana, a health insurance scheme that will cover 50 crore people, may have to drop the project. The PMO has made it clear that all new government schemes must use the Aadhaar-based direct benefit transfer platform instead of smart cards. Under the health scheme, smart cards are issued to below-poverty-line families. There are now about 3.72 crore active smart cards under the scheme. Another smart card project likely to be nixed is the labour ministry's unorganised workers' identification number or UWIN card. It would have enabled multiple ministries to provide services to such workers on a single card. In a letter to the labour secretary, Shankar Agarwal, the PMO panned the proposal. "It was conveyed to us that the workers can use the Aadhaar number to avail themselves of the benefits of different schemes," a labour ministry official said. "The PMO felt that issuing smart cards would only lead to duplication and create issues of linkages to databases already tied to Aadhaar." Unlike the Aadhaar card, which uses biometrics to specifically identify an individual, a smart card or the UWIN functions like a credit/debit card that carries a person's details so that he or she can obtain certain benefits linked to it. |
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9853 - Aadhaar shackles on smart cards - Telegraph India
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