(Representative image)

BENGALURU: For most residents of Bhangi colony near KR Market , pressing on the Aadhaar-enabled point-of-sale (PoS) machine at the nearby ration store is a crucial exercise that is riddled with unpredictability. For, the machine could deny their share of subsidized food , simply by not recognizing their thumb impression.

Despite most of them having successfully seeded their Aadhaar numbers with ration cards, many are struggling to get foodgrains from the fair price shop. The promise of food and civil supplies minister U T Khader notwithstanding, some haven’t got ration cards months after applying for updated ones. They claim their lives were much simpler when they had to flash a single card as proof of their eligibility.

Chanamma, 29, gets only 20 kg of ration a month to feed her family of seven. Since the Aadhaar numbers of two members didn’t get seeded properly, the entire family was asked to obtain a fresh one with all the beneficiaries’ names listed and seeded. She rued it is common for shop owners to send people away with considerably lesser ration than they were eligible for.

Kamalakka, 33, with a family of four, said: “They are abusive and say they themselves have received less, so everyone would be getting proportionately lesser. We don’t want to upset them so we just take what we get,” she said, adding that she had been getting her rations for many months.

While the Supreme Court had earlier said Aadhaar was not must for accessing welfare schemes, it has since provided no clarity on the same and extended the date for mandatory linking of Aadhaar till March 31, 2018. On the ground, nothing has changed as store owners demand biometric verification to dole out ration.

Jansi of the Slum Mahila Sangha said the minister had promised to issue a notification asking not to deny citizens rations for not having Aadhaar, but this is yet to reach stores. In some cases, owners have resorted to rubbing fingers of children with iodex or sunna (lime) to bypass the machine.

“People come to us desperately. Their biometric credentials don’t get validated and they would have received inadequate rations for months. The recognition of fingerprints of children and senior citizens is always challenging and genuine beneficiaries get affected. We rub the children’s fingers with iodex and apply it to the machine at different angles to make things work,” said one shop operator.

While this is being ostentatiously done, it certainly points to misuse. The question is if the system is so easy to manipulate, how reliable is the software determining people’s access to life-saving grains.

For slum-dwellers, primarily belonging to marginalized communities and surviving on government welfare schemes, technology seems to have become a bane. Majority of them are ignorant. They don’t understand allocations, biometric recognition software and the nuances of the new system. They are perplexed when they don’t get rations simply with flashing their cards, like they used to. They cannot spare a day to run around various offices to get seeding/linking done; they would rather work and buy grains at market rates. A public distribution system (PDS) adalat with food department officials and shop keepers was supposed to be held on the 7th of every month in slums to educate people and resolve their grievances. This has not happened.

