Patna: Supporters claim that linking Aadhaar with social programmes has helped to reduce leakage and improve targeting of benefits. Detractors argue that savings are minimal and that such linking has increased the exclusion of genuine beneficiaries; for instance, through failures to read the fingerprints of elderly recipients or manual labourers or through power and connectivity failures that prevent authentication....
Thus began a special lecture, organised by IGC India and the Asian Development Research Institute (Adri), on "Biometric Authentication and Social Programs: Evidence from 8 years of research across India" that was delivered by Sandip Sukhtankar, professor of economics, University of Virginia, and lead academic, IGC India.
Over the past decade, Sukhtankar has studied the impact of the integration of biometric authentication into India's flagship social programmes across several locations and schemes.
His field work has spanned Andhra Pradesh (and present-day Telangana), Chandigarh, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Pondicherry, and Jharkhand; and the national rural employment guarantee scheme, the public distribution scheme (PDS), and pensions.
His research, Sukhtankar said, has revealed that results depend largely on the context, including the programme in question, the specific design of the authentication process, the level and nature of pre-existing fraud, and state-level implementation capacity.
"In Jharkhand... we found essentially no ghost PDS beneficiaries on the roster.... Instead, most leakage here was not through identify fraud, but quantity fraud, where legitimate beneficiaries were given only a fraction of their entitlement. Unsurprisingly, we find that Aadhaar-backed authentication has had no measurable effect on this form of corruption," he said.
"Second, it is important to distinguish between the decision to link (or 'seed') Aadhaar accounts to programme records (which may help to clean up beneficiary databases) and the decision to make Aadhaar mandatory for authenticating every transaction (which may raise the risk of exclusion error). In Andhra Pradesh beneficiaries were encouraged and given multiple opportunities to obtain biometric IDs, but override mechanisms were left in place ensuring they could continue to receive payments even if they had not.
Hence, he said, over 90 per cent of beneficiaries preferred the new system to the old.
In Jharkhand on the other hand, where Aadhaar was made fully mandatory at least in a subset of 'online' ration shops, only 53 per cent of beneficiaries preferred the new system.
He also cited other problems: "Our study of the DBT (direct benefit transfer) pilots in the PDS in Chandigarh, Pondicherry, and Dadra and Nagar Haveli found that over 20 per cent of beneficiaries reported not receiving the cash... simply because many beneficiaries were not aware that disbursements had been made or how to access them."
Sukhtankar concluded that "the fundamental problem for service delivery in India is not Aadhaar or no Aadhaar - but the lack of systematic focus on the beneficiary experience."
Present at the event were Adri members secretary Shaibal Gupta, rural development principal secretary Arvind Chaudhary, and Adri director Prabhat P. Ghosh.
