A new study has backed the claim by activists and media reports that Jharkhand’s decision to link welfare schemes, particularly the public distribution system, with Aadhaar led to genuine beneficiaries being excluded. A sample survey by the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab – which counts Nobel laureates Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo among its founders – has found that close to 88% of deleted ration cards belonged to genuine households.
Between 2016 and 2018, the state government had been cancelling ration cards of what it calls “ghost beneficiaries” in an attempt to stop “leakages” from the PDS system. According to the J-PAL study by economists Karthik Muralidharan, Paul Niehaus and Sandip Sukhtankar, the entire process did reduce some amount of leakage “but also led to non-trivial increase in exclusion error and transaction costs for beneficiaries”.
Requiring Aadhaar to obtain PDS benefits in Jharkhand led to considerable reduction in leakage, but also
— source thewire.in | Jahnavi Sen | 23/02/2020