The audit by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India highlighted the various loopholes present in the functioning of Unique Identification Authority of India. Analyse (200 Words)
Refer - Financial Express
Enrich the answer from other sources, if the question demands.
IAS Parliament 3 years
KEY POINTS
· The recent report of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) on the UIDAI is somewhat of a landmark.
· The report is a scathing indictment of the way the project is run, and it confirms the apprehensions that were taken to court.
· It is not possible to ensure if all those on the UID database are even ‘residents’. A ‘resident’ has to have been in the country for at least 182 days in the 12 months preceding enrolment.
· UIDAI could not provide Regional Office-wise data because, they said, “such data was not available to them.” Instances of “issue of Aadhaars with the same biometric data to different residents” were reported.
· UIDAI also stated that as per the approved procedure for enrolment, operators could complete the enrolment even with poor quality biometrics through “forced capture” after four unsuccessful attempts to capture biometric data.
· When the challenge to the UID project was still in court, disturbing reports of deaths due to hunger had begun to emerge. Some of them were attributable to biometric problems.
· UIDAI cannot provide authentication failure rates at the state level since it does not track location of the authentication transactions.
· The UIDAI, however, took the burden off their shoulders, passing it on to requesting entities (who) are obliged under the law to provide for exception handling mechanisms.
