public distribution system

Reetika Khera

CEPT University

Aadhaar was intended to end corruption and solve problems related to integration of(PDS) and National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), but has failed miserably in achieving these purposes, opined, associate professor of economics at IIMA. She was speaking during a lecture on 'Understanding Aadhaar and Its impact on Development Schemes' aton Friday.Khera suggested that Aadhaar is a threat to the right to life and privacy. "People have to undergo biometric authentication wherein they have to place their finger in the POS machine. If the machine fails to read their fingerprints, they are denied ration. This system leaves them vulnerable," she said, adding, "Biometric authentication has not fixed the problem. There are more damages than solutions. Aadhaar is pain without gain. It has raised a whole generation of problems," she said.According to her, dealers have access to the database of beneficiaries. "There have been cases of a person taking grains in the name of another. Families with no biometric authentication got nothing," she said. Those who did not link their ration cards with aadhaar were declared fake beneficiaries, she said, pointing to the rule that at least one person's aadhaar number in a family should be linked to the ration card.She opined that Aadhaar has made middlemen stronger. "Linking of Aadhaar with bank accounts, mobile phone, email, employment and health records is the recipe for a disaster," she said. "Privacy is the soul of democracy but Aadhaar curtails it. It comes with commercial and government surveillance. It is a centralised data. Making it mandatory is not a call for democracy," she added.Seeking a fight against it on the lines of Article 377, she said that the huge number of petitions seeking scrapping of Aadhaar is an indication that it is creating more hassles. "Big corporates are gaining from it," she added.