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Anganwadis across India are currently busy meeting an end-of-the-month target: Ensuring Aadhaar verification of children who are beneficiaries of the Centre’s Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS). According to official UIDAI records, only about 30 million children have Aadhaar numbers. To put this in context, this is about 36 per cent of the children enrolled under Anganwadis.
Many workers told Down To Earth that Anganwadi centres received a directive in April from central government's Ministry of Women & Child Development. The orders said they must mandatorily link beneficiaries’ identities with their Aadhaar numbers.
The linking is compulsory for beneficiaries to access supplementary nutrition and free food provided at 13.89 lakh Anganwadi centres.
At present, around 82.89 million children under six years of age are enrolled with Anganwadi centres. This is three times the total number of children under six years that have Aadhaar.
For now, the Anganwadi workers are registering children without Aadhaars based on their parents’ Aadhaars.
Anganwadi services are a part of ICDS and a flagship programme of the central government for early childhood care and development. The beneficiaries are children aged 0-6 years, pregnant women and lactating mothers.
The centres provide essential services like supplementary nutrition, non-formal pre-school education, nutrition, immunisation, health check-up and health education.
July 10 was the official deadline for the linkage, but technical issues extended it to the month-end.
An Anganwadi supervisor, who wished to remain anonymous, said she found only 40-45 per cent of the kids with her centres had Aadhaars. She manages six southeast Delhi centres, each with around 60 children on average.
The supervisor agreed that verifying the children’s identities based on the parents’ cards was a temporary fix. “We have told the parents to get Aadhaars for children as soon as possible,” she said.
She said there had been similar directives in the past but were taken leniently. “However, this time, the Centre seems serious about it and we have been told to implement it from July,” she said.
An Anganwadi helper in Uttar Pradesh confirmed the order. “Higher authorities have told us that Aadhaar cards are a must from July,” said the worker in Rae Bareli district’s Amawan block.
“Those who don’t have Aadhaar will not be given supplementary food under ICDS. But since the verification process is not complete yet, we have a few days,” she said.
Workers in other states repeated the same orders.
In West Bengal’s Cooch Behar, Anganwadi worker Sabina Yasmin pointed out another problem. The district shares its border with Bangladesh and is a flood-prone area.
“Many people have lost their documents in the floods over several years. In many cases, getting even the parents’ Aadhaar cards is difficult. So we are verifying the children based on their grandparents or other family members for now,” she said.
Anganwadi workers and helpers are not sure how long this verification will hold.
Experts worry that the current mandate could soon lead to millions of poor children losing access to food and nutrition. The move is especially worrisome when India is combating malnutrition and hunger, made worse by the two years of the pandemic.
The experience with ration cards and Public Distribution System services showed that Aadhaar leads to exclusion on a large scale, said Raj Shekhar Singh, national coordinator of Right To Food Campaign. The organisation is an informal network committed to realising the right to food in India.
Singh said:
Bringing Aadhaar into ICDS violates the Right to Food Act, which mandates the universalisation of the entitlement. Our ground surveys and reports on ration cards over the years have found a huge number of ration cards get cancelled based on Aadhaar verification, especially due to biometrics and iris scan challenges.
“The government says that Aadhaar is necessary to weed out bogus claimants, but we have noticed that a large section of genuine cases is also left out,” he added.
He said that the move also violated a 2018 Supreme Court order that no subsidy or service may be denied for want of an Aadhaar number.