Aadhaar

Aadhaar-linked welfare system

Jharkhand's Aadhaar-based biometric authentication joined a national identity service to the Public Distribution System while leaving eligibility, stock, delivery, and redress with different public actors. Audits, field studies, litigation, affected-family reporting, and a later experimental evaluation show that authentication alone increased collection costs and excluded some unseeded households without reducing leakage; subsequent stock reconciliation reduced leakage but also reduced legitimate receipts. The case turns on whether exception handling preserves food while records fail.

When an identity service returns 'no' or a record fails to link, which public actor still owns the legal duty to feed the person?