Digital exclusion

 As the Digital India dream is being vigorously pursued across the country, it could very well turn into a nightmare for a crucial segment of the population inhabiting the reality that is Bharat. These are the people eking out a precarious existence in remote interiors where the government machinery does not reach them. Many are unlettered, homeless, mentally ill, utterly destitute, abandoned and beyond the pale of society. They are the ones who need the government’s help utmost. Not only has the country hitherto failed them, they now risk being kept out totally by digital walls being erected in the me of efficient governce. A case in point is the mandatory linking of Aadhaar number to an ever expanding set of identity proofs, which in turn is determining the access of the poor to welfare schemes. When slip-ups occur, consequences can be tragic, as it happened in Simdega district of Jharkhand recently. An 11-year-old girl allegedly died after starving for over a week — because her family had been struck off from PDS rolls for failing to link their ration card with Aadhaar number. With her mother recounting to the media how the girl kept begging for a morsel of rice till her last breath, an embarrassed Jharkhand government has ordered a probe. Official cover-up attempts seem to have already begun, with some quarters attributing the girl’s death to malaria. But all that is beside the point. Right to Food activists fear that such incidents could recur due to faulty grassroots implementation of the government’s efforts to clean up the public distribution system (PDS). Blanket insistence on Aadhaar linkage to ration cards by block and village level officials is leading to lakhs of poor, needy people being left out of PDS rolls. While these officials scramble to meet targets of weeding out bogus ration card holders — activists allege that even when genuine beneficiaries arm themselves with Aadhaar card, officials fail to link these with ration cards as internet networks are feeble in rural areas, the server or portal is down, and the power supply is intermittent or absent. For poor families, a new ration card ‘seeded’ with the 12-digit Aadhaar number could come after a long, anxious wait, or too late in the day. Clearly, governments at the Centre and various States are steadily bypassing the Supreme Court’s directive that Aadhaar number cannot be made compulsory to avail of benefits under government welfare schemes, particularly ration cards to buy subsidised foodgrains.