Caught unaware, beneficiaries protest, then relent on Aadhaar

Despite good Aadhaar coverage, things still not easy for administration

Every day at noon, a list of births in Mysore district?s government hospitals over the previous 24 hours turns up at the district health office. By 3:30 pm, an allowance of R700 to each new mother is on its way to her bank account.

Over the past week, direct benefits transfers (DBT) linked to Aadhaar numbers have got off the ground in Mysore, Karnataka, replacing cheques and cash payments in the disbursement of educational scholarships and maternity allowance scheme Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY). Still, in a district that has up to 95% Aadhaar coverage, things haven?t been easy.

For instance, only a third of 310 JSY beneficiaries between January 1-8 could get their allowances transferred directly because they had an Aadhaar number linked to the bank account. For those who did not have an account, the district administration has been urging banks to speed up the process, while hospitals say they have had to deal with beneficiaries asking for a cheque. Many of these people say they weren?t aware of the new form of payment.

?Initially, there were some protests from relatives of the beneficiaries,? says B Krishnamurthy, medical superintendent at Cheluvamba Hospital, which handles at least 40 deliveries a day. ?This (DBT) has made things easier for us. We required 15-20 minutes earlier to process the cheque payment for each patient. If there are 15-20 beneficiaries a day, you need to spend at least four hours on that,? he says.

Nagendra, a resident of Mysore, says the first question he was asked when he admitted his niece to the VV Puram maternity hospital in Mysore was whether she had an Aadhaar number and a bank account. She had neither, and Nagendra says the family plans to enroll her as soon as possible. ?It is better for us as we don?t need to run around for our benefits. For everything now, we are being asked for the Aadhaar number and bank account,? he says.

Elsewhere, about 48 children out of 111 attending special schools under the National Child Labour Project have received this month?s stipend of R150 each through their Aadhaar-linked bank accounts. The others will get their stipends in batches.

The DBT scheme is currently underway in three Karnataka districts?Mysore, Tumkur and Dharwad?and authorities are hopeful of adding more services as the process of migrating on to the single-payment platform gets streamlined.

?It?s not so much of an infrastructure-related thing, but of getting the system to gel,? says ISN Prasad, Karnataka?s principal secretary for IT. ?Once we start social security pensions and NREGA payments, it would be a good test of the implementation.? Prasad is hopeful of starting MGNREGA (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act) payments through direct transfers by the end of the month in a bid to iron out delays in cash disbursements.

Most officials here say the key factor slowing down the implementation is still the availability of Aadhaar numbers. In Mysore district alone, as many as 20 enrollment centres have been opened in the past week to get more people onboard and expand the delivery system.

?For us also, it makes things very convenient and we can easily find out the status of a scheme. Besides, the logic of thinking on the part of a government servant will now change,? says Ajay Nagabhushan, acting deputy commissioner of Mysore district.

Payments in at least 16 different social welfare schemes, including various scholarships for students, are currently being made through the DBT route in Mysore district. In one of these schemes, the National Means-cum-Merit Scholarships, there are 550 beneficiaries in Mysore. Of them, 440 have Aadhaar cards linked to their bank accounts, while the remaining have completed their Aadhaar enrollment procedures but are yet to get their cards.

The National Means-cum-Merit Scholarship is a centrally-sponsored scheme to award scholarships to meritorious students of economically weaker sections with a view to arrest their dropouts at class VIII level and encourage them to progress on to the secondary stage. Students of class VIII, who have cleared an eligibility test, will get an allowance of R500 per month till they reach class XII.