Government Trusts Aadhaar On Welfare. It Needs To Rely On It To Make Voter Lists, Pg10

Key Highlights:

• The Election Commission (EC) is conducting a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, which has deleted over 13 crore names since June 2025.
• The Supreme Court upheld the SIR exercise but clarified that citizenship determination rests with the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), not the EC.
• The current SIR method involves document-intensive, house-to-house verification, costing thousands of crores and mobilizing around 10 lakh public servants.
• The article advocates for an Aadhaar-based alternative for voter list revision, citing its cost-effectiveness and efficiency.
• Aadhaar is proposed as a tool to verify identity, remove duplicates, confirm age, and cross-check addresses, with linkage remaining voluntary.

Detailed Insights:

• The SIR process places a significant burden on vulnerable populations like the poor, elderly, migrants, and women due to its reliance on physical documents and compressed deadlines.
• Errors in the SIR can lead to wrongful deletions, potentially impacting access to welfare benefits like rations and pensions.
• The current method is deemed ruinously expensive and recurring, contrasting sharply with the modest, one-time expenditure required for an Aadhaar-based digital infrastructure.
• The article highlights that traditional documents like passports, Voter ID, and PAN are not definitive proofs of citizenship, and birth registration was historically inconsistent.
• Aadhaar is presented as a robust identity proof, already used for de-duplicating PAN, closing benami accounts, and removing ghost beneficiaries from welfare schemes, saving over Rs 2.7 lakh crore.
• The technology's reliability is demonstrated by its use in Digi Yatra (over 10 crore face authentications) and Jeevan Pramaan (1.47 crore pensioners proving life status).
• An Aadhaar-based system would allow voluntary linkage via mobile or web, using face authentication to prove a voter is alive, remove duplicates, and verify age and address.
• The proposed system would identify everyone first, use analytics to flag genuine outliers, and refer only those cases to the MHA for citizenship determination, aligning with the Supreme Court's directive.

Key Concepts Involved:

• Special Intensive Revision (SIR): A process by the Election Commission to update and clean electoral rolls through house-to-house verification.
• Aadhaar: A 12-digit unique identification number issued by the UIDAI to residents of India, serving as proof of identity and residence.
• Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA): The government ministry responsible for internal security and domestic policy, including citizenship matters.
• UIDAI: The Unique Identification Authority of India, a statutory authority responsible for issuing Aadhaar numbers.