Rethink Aadhaar joins the Right to Food campaign, Odisha to condemn the Odisha Government’s decision to restrict the payment of social security pensions to those whose accounts are “Aadhaar verified,” and to make the payments to those who can show Aadhaar “cards” as proof of identification. More than 11 lakh persons could lose their benefits as a result of this decision, with little recourse as the verification process is shrouded in opacity. 

The move comes barely a month after the tragic starvation death of 46-year-old Dukhi Jani, a tribal widow, who had been struck off the pension and food ration lists, due to—from all accounts – Aadhaar verification failures. 

Odisha’s pensions schemes have received praise for their wide coverage and people-friendly mode of payment. Under the National Social Assistance Programme (NSAP) and the Madhu Babu Pension Yojana (MBPY) some of the most vulnerable citizens living in poverty, including the elderly, persons with disabilities, widows, and transgenders persons, get a pension of between Rs. 500 - Rs. 900 a month. This amount is often a lifeline for the close to 49 lakh persons who are beneficiaries under these two schemes.

Mandatory Aadhaar linkage and verification threatens to curtail this tenuous line of support. In July and August, the Odisha Government’s Department of Social Security & Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities issued two circulars specifying that the pensions and an “ex gratia” amount of Rs.1000 were to be disbursed (in cash) only to those who carried Aadhaar cards as proof of identity, and only to those accounts which had been “Aadhaar verified”. 

As per the updated National Dashboard of National Social Assistance Programme, only 83% of the NSAP accounts in Odisha have been “verified” by Aadhaar, while only 74%  have been verified for the MBPY scheme. This means that more than 11 lakh persons could lose their benefits because of a lack of “Aadhaar verification”.

Mandatory linkages with Aadhaar have caused mass exclusions, both at the point of disbursal of welfare entitlements (because of biometric or technical failures) and during the process of seeding and verification. A January 2020 study of the PDS system in Jharkhand found that close to 88% households excluded due to Aadhaar verification were genuine beneficiaries.

There is no clear method to appeal these exclusions, and persons struck off these lists are left running from pillar to post. The Aadhaar seeding and verification processes are shrouded in opacity, as they can fail for a range of reasons, often without any of the responsible officials understanding the reason for the failure, or how it should be remedied. The Aadhaar-enabled Payments System (AePS) comes with its own share of failures, due to poor design, missing safeguards, and a confusing array of failure codes. Remedying this is close to impossible for those who are not mobile, have limited access to transportation, or live in an area far from administrative headquarters. These difficulties have been exponentially exacerbated by the ongoing pandemic.

Aware of the Aadhaar project’s harmful and exclusionary impacts, in 2017, the Naveen Patnaik government opposed linking Aadhaar to accounts of beneficiaries of welfare schemes as it would cause “hardship” to beneficiaries. However, in January 2020, it went back on this, and announced that pension accounts would have to be linked to Aadhaar for “verification” and seeding.

 The purpose of verifying beneficiaries is not served by Aadhaar verification or linkage. The Aadhaar database was created on the basis of self-verified documents, and the Aadhaar “card” is just a printout, which was not intended to serve as a proof of identity. Awake to the pandemic-related threats fingerprint authentication poses, biometric authentication has been suspended in many states during the pandemic.

Making Aadhaar a barrier to welfare entitlements, particularly during a pandemic, is a callous move which can have fatal implications, as was seen in Dukhi Jani’s case. The Government of Odisha must reverse its recent order, to ensure that rights of the most vulnerable citizens of our country are not curtailed due to experiments with technology.