#India- #Aadhaar Roundup: Ration Cards, Govt Salaries, Passport, Direct Cash Transfer & More #UID

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By Apurva Chaudhary on Jan 11th, 2013 | medianama.com

Mandatory Aadhaar?

– Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) employees have not received their salary for the month of December 2012 due to lack of UID card. The salary was stopped as per instructions from municipal commissioner Sitaram Kunte and additional municipal commissioner Manisha Mhaiskar. BMC had asked their staffers to get the aadhar card back in 2011. However, BMC has now given them an extension of two months to get the UID card and have paid their salary for the month of December 2012. Read more.

– The revenue department experimented with mandating UID number or an enrollment slip for availing any of the 20 services offered by the revenue department. Read more.

– The Bombay High Court has suggested to the state government to consider linking ration cards with Aadhaar cards to tackle the menace of bogus and duplicate ration cards. Read more.

– The Ministry of External Affairs has advised all Passport Issuing Authorities to accept Aadhaar letter as Proof of Address and Photo identity. The ministry hopes this will makes passport documentation less cumbersome. Read more.

Reliability Issues

– Strangely, people are receiving Aadhaar cards for a second time, despite already having received them earlier: fourteen branch post offices in Garladinne mandal have received a bunch of Aadhaar cards second time. Read more.

– The exercise to collect Biometric details including photograph, fingerprints and iris scan for the UID and National Population Register (NPR) began in Uttar Pradesh. Read more.

– Unique Identification Authority of India ( UIDAI)’s Aadhaar program will use Iris Scan along along with a finger print scan for authentication. There’s a risk of deterioration of beneficiaries’ fingerprint quality over the years, using iris scan and fingerprint scan will ensure accuracy. Read more.

Direct Cash Transfer

– About 2,000 beneficiaries were transferred an amount of Rs 35 lakh (Rs 3.5 million) on the Aadhaar platform on day 1 of implementing direct cash transfer. The program is aimed at covering 200,000 beneficiaries. Read more.

– CPI(M) has questioned the legality of the government’s cash transfer scheme, saying the law on which the program is based has not yet been passed by Parliament. Read more.

– Rural development minister Jairam Ramesh’s interview where he raises a question on why non-UPA and opposition-ruled states such as Bihar, West Bengal, UP, Odisha and Tamil Nadu, where poverty is very high, were excluded from the first phase of direct (cash) benefit transfer (DBT) scheme which was launched on January 1. Read more.

– Activists were skeptical of the government’s rush to link these cash transfers to Aadhar. They are of the opinion that linking of these schemes can cause huge disruption, not to speak of exclusion, of those who do not have Aadhaar numbers. Read more.

– The Government of India launched direct cash transfer in three districts of Rajasthan with the number of selected welfare schemes being scaled down from the original 26 to merely seven. Read more.

– The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) will set a toll free helpline, which will be operational from January 13, 2012 to address queries on the Aadhaar scheme. The helpline will be linked to data centers the UIDAI’s data centres at Greater Noida and Bangalore.. Read more.