Fifty-Four Thousand Failed Pensions: Targeting versus Exclusion
In a district in northern Tamil Nadu, 4.6 lakh people receive the old-age and widow pension through bank accounts seeded with Aadhaar. Last quarter 54,000 payments failed at the biometric authentication stage. Seventy-one per cent of the failures were women above 60 who hold no smartphone, and for many the nearest bank branch is nine kilometres away. Bank officials say re-seeding takes three weeks and a fresh Aadhaar update, for which the enrolment centre opens only twice a week. Panchayat presidents report that some genuinely ineligible persons continue to be paid, but no one can quantify the leakage. The district collector has ₹40 lakh of untied funds, a monthly review meeting in ten days, and pressure from a newspaper that has photographed queues outside the bank. The Aadhaar-based system was introduced to stop ghost pensions.
1. Diagnose the failure using the proportionality standard. Is the policy's design the problem, or its implementation?
Read the worked answer
Both, but design dominates. The aim - preventing ghost and duplicate pensions - is legitimate and falls within the State's power to make a targeted subsidy scheme. The proportionality inquiry, as applied in Puttaswamy (Aadhaar, 2018), asks three further questions.
Suitability: biometric seeding does detect duplicates, so the measure is rationally connected. Necessity: is it the least restrictive means? An 11.7 per cent failure rate among genuinely eligible people, concentrated among elderly widows, shows that it is not; the same aim can be served by deduplication at enrolment, periodic physical verification or exception handling at the point of payment. Balancing: the loss of a pension for a quarter, for a woman who must travel nine kilometres, outweighs the unquantified leakage the district itself admits it cannot measure. Note also that Section 7 of the Aadhaar Act is a provision for the delivery of benefits, not a licence to deny them; authentication failure must not become denial where identity can be established by other means. The problem is not Aadhaar as such but a design with no exception path - an implementation gap that has hardened into a rights violation.
2. You are the collector. What do you do in the next thirty days with ₹40 lakh and one review meeting?
Read the worked answer
The first principle is to separate verification from payment: nobody already on the rolls should lose a pension merely because authentication failed.
Immediate: instruct banks to run exception handling - iris or manual verification by the branch manager with a panchayat-level officer's attestation - and to restore payment for the 54,000 before further seeding is demanded. Use the untied funds for three mobile enrolment and update camps in the worst-affected panchayats, and for transport support for women above 70. Fix a service-level agreement with the lead bank manager within the review meeting: a maximum of seven days for re-seeding and a written reason whenever payment fails.
Short term: publish ward-wise failure lists under Section 4 of the RTI Act, hold a pension adalat with bank and post-office officers, and set up a grievance register at the panchayat office with a named officer accountable for closure. In the review meeting, ask for one number that has not been asked for so far - the measured leakage - so that the trade-off can be argued on evidence rather than assertion.
3. Redesign the scheme rule in two sentences, and state who is accountable when a payment fails.
Read the worked answer
The rule: Aadhaar may be used to establish identity and remove duplicates, but no beneficiary already verified shall be denied or delayed a pension solely because electronic authentication failed, and every failure shall trigger an alternate verification route initiated by the paying agency within seven days, with the burden of follow-up on the agency rather than the beneficiary. Accountability is shared and must be named: the panchayat-level officer verifies, the bank pays and reports failures, the district collector reviews, and the state nodal department audits - but the legal duty to deliver lies on the State, so a failure at any link is a failure of the State, not of the old woman who could not authenticate her fingerprint. The redesign converts a discretionary favour into an enforceable entitlement with a time limit and a remedy, which is exactly what the proportionality test demands.