NEW DELHI: Right to Food Campaign, in a press release on Thursday, expressed shock and dismay at the arguments of Attorney General KK Venugopal in Supreme Court in the ongoing case on whether the right to privacy is a fundamental right. Venugopal told the court that the Aadhaar project is necessary to ensure food security and for implementation of welfare programmes essential to the Right to Life.Though the nine-judge bench is not hearing any arguments on the Aadhaar project, Venugopal reportedly made the comments. The Right to Food Campaign said it welcomed the recognition that the National Food Security Act (which includes the Public Distribution System, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act and social security pensions) was important in realizing right to life. However, all reports so far point to the devastation and exclusion that Aadhaar-integration is causing in these programmes, Right to Food said, contradicting the claim by the government that Aadhaar was needed for these very schemes.State food departments have shown that in Rajasthan, 33 lakh families are unable to access Public Distribution System (PDS) ration entitlement each month due to the linkage of the PDS with Aadhaar. In Jharkhand , 2.5 lakh people are deprived of their grain entitlements on a monthly basis. Even in areas like Ranchi district where the integration has been in place for over a year, the rate of non-transacting households is high.In June 2017, in Ranchi District, only 67% were able to buy their grain through Aadhaar-Based Biometric Authentication.There are ongoing cases in the Delhi HC, Karnataka HC and the Rajasthan HC challenging the linking of Aadhaar to ration cards and making it mandatory for PDS. The Rajasthan and Karnataka HCs have given an interim stay on the linking of Aadhaar and ration card. In the case in Delhi HC affidavits showing large scale exclusion of people due to Aadhaar have been submitted and the HC has appointed a local commissioner to look into the issue of exclusion.The damage caused by Aadhaar is not limited to the PDS. NREGA workers and social security pensioners are also suffering due to this application. People’s pensions have been stopped because their Aadhaar numbers are not seeded, or cannot be seeded; in some cases, old people whose biometrics do not match are denied their entitlements (rations, pensions, etc). In one village in Badauli block, Sarguja District, Chhattisgarh 124 old people are not able to access their old age pensions as the village does not have network connectivity.Such denials of entitlements are in fact in violation of the right to life and must be penalized.The damage is likely to spread further, as the government plans to make it compulsory for mid-day meals, scholarships, etc. In the Mid-Day Meal programme, there is hardly any reliable evidence of identity fraud. There are other problems in the programme (the quality of food served, disruptions etc), which cannot be solved by Aadhaar integration. Recent anecdotal evidence from Jharkhand also suggests that the biometrics of children are not working – in some schools, the number of children physically present was greater than the number that were recorded by the Aadhaar-Based Biometric Attendance machines. If this is widespread, and if the government starts making allocations on the basis of Aadhaar attendance, genuine beneficiaries are likely to be knocked out.The Right to Food Campaign feels that by putting all the focus on Aadhaar, the government is distracting attention from the real issues in the implementation of these programmes – the need to introduce pulses and oil in the PDS, eggs and other nutritious items in the MDM programme, timely payments in NREGA, raising its contribution to social security pensions from Rs200, and so on. The Campaign urges the nine-judge Constitution bench to take note of mounting evidence of the failure of Aadhaar in welfare programmes and demands that all notifications linking Aadhaar with welfare programmes (NREGA, PDS, MDM, pensions etc) be immediately withdrawn.