Banks mess up Aadhaar entry, relief delayed to 40,000 farmers

Bengaluru: More than 40,000 farmers who were to receive compensation for loss of their kharif crop did not get the money on time as their Aadhaar data was entered incorrectly by banks.
T M Vijaya Bhaskar, Karnataka development commissioner and additional chief secretary, said, “We found as many as 40,000 cases where the actual beneficiary details were not matching and the subsidy went to somebody else.Though the number is only 3% of the total number of beneficiaries, the fact that there are loopholes that need to be fixed is important,” he said.
He was speaking at a workshop on Aadhaar-enabled applications organized by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI). The official, however, said the discrepancies were set right immediately and the amount transferred to wrong accounts was retrieved.
He epxlained that when the Karnataka government decided to deposit money directly into accounts of farmers whose kharif crop was devastated by severe drought a few months ago, it decided to use Aadhaar data to confirm their identities. After the deputy commissioners of drought-affected districts prepared the list of beneficiaries, the government developed an algorithm to compare the details of beneficiaries as per the revenue land records in the Bhoomi software with that of the Aadhaar database. While most of the data matched, there were cases of mismatch.
MVS Rami Reddy, deputy director general, UIDAI regional office, Hyderabad, said wrong seeding of Aadhaar data at banks leads to such errors. “Even in Andhra Pradesh similar mistakes were witnessed during the benefit transfer under Indira Awaas Yojana. Some benefits got transferred to bank accounts of people in West Bengal, who were not the targeted beneficiaries. We have instructed banks to make sure they validate the demographic and other data with UIDAI before seeding Aadhaar numbers into bank accounts,” he said.
UIDAI officials said they were also checking whether the wrong entries were made deliberately in banks. Some states have initiated action against banks for making wrong entries, they said.