When Mula was felled by 'financial inclusion'
For months, Mula’s wages for her MGNREGA work in Dadeora village of Uttar Pradesh were lost in a maze of online accounts and direct benefit transfers, which often add to the distress of the rural poor
March 18, 2019 | Puja Awasthi
Pick a card, any card, in Dharauta…
Does having an Aadhaar card make access to all government schemes a lot easier? A hunger death in a village in UP’s Allahabad district shows that the process of getting any card can overwhelm the poor
July 9, 2018 | Puja Awasthi
Good enough to vote, not enough for Aadhaar
Parwati Devi's fingers are damaged due to leprosy. So this waste worker in Lucknow – and possibly thousands similarly afflicted – cannot get an Aadhaar card, and without it cannot get her disability pension or rations
March 30, 2018 | Puja Awasthi
Fake ration cards or faulty Aadhaar data?
Mismatched numbers, wrong photos, disappearing names, fingerprinting errors – Aadhaar is in full flow in AP's Anantapur district. At the receiving end are BPL card holders who have been denied rations for months
February 26, 2018 | Rahul M.
Aadhaar robs Lakshmi of wealth
Unable to access hard earned-wages, MGNREGA workers in AP's Visakhapatnam district are learning that even bearing the name of the Goddess of Wealth doesn't save you from Aadhaar's many mess-ups
February 14, 2018 | Rahul Maganti
'Aadhaar took away whatever we were getting'
With the high cost of commuting to Aadhaar centres in hilly Uttarakhand, misspelt names and other glitches, many widows, the disabled and the elderly in Champawat district have not received their pension for months
February 2, 2018 | Arpita Chakrabarty
When the man knows you, the machine doesn’t
The elderly, migrants, daily wage workers, even children in Bengaluru’s slums are among those being denied their monthly rations due to fingerprint mismatches – and in their battles with Aadhaar, Aadhaar always wins
January 24, 2018 | Vishaka George
Indu and Aadhaar – Act II, Scene 2
PARI’s story on how Aadhaar glitches disrupted the lives of young Dalit and Muslim schoolkids in Anantapur, Andhra Pradesh, has had a welcome initial fallout
January 30, 2018 | Rahul M.
What’s in a name? The agonies of Aadhaar
“My name is Indu, but my first Aadhaar card made it ‘Hindu’. So I applied for a new card [seeking a correction], but they made it ‘Hindu’ again.” So J. Indu, a 10-year-old Dalit girl, and four other students in the fifth standard of the government primary school at Amadagur, won’t get their scholarships this year
January 16, 2018 | Rahul M.
Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) and another versus Union of India and others
On September 26, 2018, a five-judge constitution bench of the Supreme Court of India (a bench of not less than five judges that deliberates substantive questions of law in relation to the Constitutional text) gave this judgement on a string of writ petitions that questioned the constitutional validity of Aadhaar. While the majority judgement upheld Aadhaar’s constitutionality and struck down some provisions of the Aadhaar Act , Justice D.Y. Chandrachud’s dissenting judgement found the entire Act unconstitutional
September 26, 2018 | Chief Justice Dipak Misra, and Justices A.K. Sikri, A.M. Khanwilkar, D.Y. Chandrachud and Ashok Bhushan
The Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Act, 2016
The Aadhaar Act aims to provide “efficient and transparent” delivery of subsidies, benefits and services to Indian residents by assigning them unique identity numbers. The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), set up under this Act, is responsible for helping people ‘enrol’ or sign up for Aadhaar numbers, verifying their identity information, issuing Aadhaar numbers, and authenticating information provided by individuals on the request of public or private entities
