On DBT-F Rollout

I was reading the book "Rebooting India" by Nandan Nilekani and Viral Shah for the past several days. It contains a treasure trove of information on the Aadhaar project as it comes from two of the top people at UIDAI with anecdotes by several others. I would definitely post some excerpts from the book and highlight a few points of importance in my future posts.

For now, I am writing about an idea I have been toying with since a few months which I have expressed in several online forums.

I humbly wish to state that the DBT rollout for fertilizers is not going to work as smoothly as expected. Ground work in terms of steps need to be taken to launch DBT-F, if I may coin the acronym needs to be in place.

Firstly, those fertilizer factories that have been closed down due to losses need to be revived. Secondly, fertilizer production needs to be boosted in order to reassure farmers that adequate quantities of them will be available and that there is no need to hoard them.

Factories producing fertilizers are to be reassured that all due payments would be cleared. In fact these factories have been demanding DBT-F rollout, which would at least make subsidy payments timely for them.

For DBT-F to work farmers need to be on-boarded into the system. It is very obvious that their aadhaar number would need to be made mandatory which could pose problems. An alternative in the form of Voter-ID or PAN card should be thought of. The tracking of fertilizer sales till the retail level would be difficult. May be the factories producing fertilizers should themselves market their produce as fertilizer distribution companies. How to ensure that there is buy-in of the new system and least amount of protest or resistance?

Solution:

Only phosphorous and potassium based fertilizers should be brought under subsidy regime initially. Since these two are deregulated and sold at market rates a one-time KYC documentation/web site based registration to on-board these farmers could be done. Once DBT-F is implemented in deregulated fertilizers farmers will flock to register themselves (they are getting new benefit of reduced prices). Later, the same farmers would definitely buy urea which could be brought under DBT. This rollout of DBT where PK fertilizers are brought under DBT first can progress faster and, well before 2018 end, nationwide rollout can be achieved.
If would be difficult to accurately identify farmers and anyone purchasing fertilizer should be thought of as a farmer. If there are shortages of fertilizers then definitely there will be hoarding. That is why adequate quantities of fertilizers need to be produced and sold. So after a few cropping seasons KYC of these purchasers should be strengthened by linking with land records.

Why Nerpap stopped? Should it restart?

National Electoral Roll Purification and Authentication Programme (NERPAP) was one of the rarest program running successfully till the supreme court pulled the plug on it in Aug,11 2015 when it warned the central government against making aadhaar mandatory for social benefits.

In the drive launched sometime in march,2015 all Voter-IDs were to be linked with aadhaars by Aug,15. But due to the supreme court ruling over 34 Crore VoterID-Aadhaar links will have to be removed....(Read Here)

It is indeed a travesty of justice that getting to vote is considered a lucky event. Migrants and people on the move easily get excluded from voting. What is the solution for all of this?

????

An Ex- Chief Election Commissioner N. Goplaswamy has succintly put forth several ideas which if implemented will lead to higher voting turnouts and a greater say for the non-local population across the country (Read Here)

It has become ample clear that aadhaar solves many problems associated to not able to vote and also duplicate voting.

So the question really is this

SHOULD INDIAN PARLIAMENT AMEND THE CONSTITUTION TO MAKE IT MANDATORY FOR VOTERS TO POSSES AADHAAR CARD?

It is very clear that only Indian citizens should have the right to vote. For ensuring that let us take the first step of ensuring that only Indian Residents get to vote. The next would be to identify citizens among the population and weed out foreign origin people.

It is not easy to amend the constitution as it requires bipartisan support. Also people may raise the bogey of privacy to scuttle any plans of making aadhaar mandatory. What is the alternative before us under such circumstances?

Next question that comes then is

SHOULD INDIAN PARLIAMENT PASS A LAW TO GIVE STATUTORY PROTECTION TO NERPAP?

This is a more viable proposal under the given circumstances. Now that 1 billion people have aadhaar and it is anyhow one of the documents that can be used to vote why not link aadhaar with Voter-ID under a law passed by the parliament. The way in which NERPAP was stopped looked as though Election Commission was scared of the SC.

Let us make 2019 general elections the cleanest and most voted one.