Direct cash transfers cannot be trusted
By Sandhya Jain on December 6, 2012
The Aadhaar biometric data collection system is so fraught with danger of misuse that the Election Commission’s intervention to stall the direct cash transfer scheme linked to it, while timely, is inadequate. Hopefully the Supreme Court which has admitted a petition challenging Aadhaar for lack of constitutional validity will effectively scuttle both hare-brained schemes bulldozed by the UPA.
Direct cash transfer is UPA’s desperate strategy to shore up support to its tottering regime. Its actual impact, as suggested by reports from pilot projects, is the outright stoppage of subsidy to supposed beneficiaries on one count or other. Even supposing that every poor household in the country ultimately receives an Aadhaar number-linked bank account, there is no guarantee that the cash subsidies will land in beneficiaries’ accounts and not be diverted by the kind of middlemen who currently divert subsidised kerosene to the open market. As a recent scam in Citibank shows, it is easy to manipulate internet banking!
Aadhaar makes subsidy-diversion scams easier (scamsters don’t have to sell grain or kerosene to benefit, but simply divert the cash to another account). This would double the suffering of the poor who – as pilot projects show – are forced to buy subsidised items at market prices. Worse, as a glitch (honest or contrived) can erase a household from the system, thousands of individual households can be left high and dry without redressal from such a mechanised system.
As the direct cash transfer scheme affects the entire economy which is already reeling due to stagnation, the Opposition parties should insist on deeper scrutiny by experts and a parliamentary debate with voting. Henceforth, schemes that could hurt the economy must not be rolled out in an ad hoc manner to nurture the politics of the ruling dispensation. The scheme cannot be justified on grounds that it was announced in the budget because it was not fleshed out and voted on in the budget.
The Election Commission has understandably taken the legal view that the scheme must not be implemented in poll-bound Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh where the Model Code of Conduct is in operation. In a mild censure, it has said that the announcement was “avoidable” during the election process.
But the issues involved are much larger, and the action will now shift to the Supreme Court which, on November 30, issued notice to the Centre on a PIL by Justice KS Puttaswamy (retired) of the Karnataka High Court, seeking to restrain it from issuing Aadhaar unique identification cards as the Bill giving it statutory backing is still pending in Parliament. The petition claims that Aadhaar cards are being given to non-nationals, and that as the cards are being manufactured by private companies there is a likelihood of biometric and other data being misused.
This website has already pointed out the perils of misuse of biometric data, and the blatant misuse of funds by NGOs. From the time the then Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao decided to use NGOs to widen the rGeach of overnment social welfare programmes, the leakage (read diversion) of public monies has reached mind-boggling proportions. From under Rs 9000 crore in the early 1990s, the various centrally-sponsored welfare programmes now surpass Rs 237,000 crore (2011).
One can easily correlate the rise of public funding via NGOs with the rampant growth of corruption in this sector and the rush of kin of politicians and bureaucrats into this sunrise ‘industry’. Many analysts have noted that the mushrooming of NGOs in any sector has seen a proportionate rise in problems in that sector, rather than otherwise. Take, for instance, the sterilisation of street dogs (their population has increased nationwide).
Now, with the help of 140 NGO-run resource centres, the UPA has launched the electronic transfer of funds into the bank accounts of 150 million poor households verified through Aadhaar! This is unconstitutional and arbitrary as the National Identity Authority of India Bill, 2010, on which Aadhaar is based, was rejected by the Parliamentary Standing Committee in 2011. The UPA has since coercively implemented Aadhaar via executive order of January 2009.
Justice Puttaswamy in his petition asserts that Aadhaar impinges on the right to privacy of individuals as there is no assured confidentiality and security of the biometric information collected by private agencies. The Government has also not promised to ensure that non-citizens (illegal immigrants) do not receive the benefits of cash transfer. This affects the health of the economy and the security of the nation. Worse, the Government is aware that similar schemes have failed in Britain, the US, Australia, China, Canada and Germany.
The Apex court action has not come a day too soon as Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dixit is preparing to roll out Aadhaar-based cash transfer from December 15, to build goodwill in time for the Assembly election next year.
That cash transfer is an election scheme is evidenced by the fact that the enrollment forms for the intended 4.87 lakh beneficiaries carry the photographs of the Prime Minister and the Delhi CM. As Dr Subramanian Swamy pointed out in his complaint to the Election Commission, beneficiaries have to get their forms approved by the area MLA. Obviously, it is another Congress ‘loan mela’ scheme to bestow favours on traditional Congress voters.
Related Links
http://www.niticentral.com/2012/12/direct-cash-transfers-cannot-be-trusted.html
