A proposal to use voter IDs and biometric data instead of Aadhaar to identify beneficiaries and process welfare payments has triggered fears of fresh exclusions, even though no official government order had been issued on the plan till Wednesday night.
Union panchayati raj minister Rajiv Ranjan Singh said the proposed change during an event in Delhi last week and reiterated it on the sidelines of a programme in Gangtok on Tuesday. He said Aadhaar would no longer be the primary basis for identifying beneficiaries and that biometric data and Elector Photo Identity Card, or EPIC, numbers from voter cards would be used instead.
“Presently, Aadhaar is the basis for payments to beneficiaries. But it will no longer be considered the primary basis for identifying beneficiaries,” Singh said in Gangtok. In Delhi, he questioned the easy availability of Aadhaar cards and suggested that this could allow people to obtain them fraudulently. He said the proposed system would ensure that only eligible people received welfare benefits.
The scope of the proposal remains unclear. It has not been established whether Singh was referring only to schemes under the Panchayati Raj ministry or to all government welfare programmes. The absence of a formal notification also means that the operational process, implementation timeline and treatment of people unable to produce or authenticate a voter ID have not been specified.
The remarks come amid protests and political opposition to the ongoing special intensive revision, or SIR, of electoral rolls. The CPM’s politburo said on Wednesday that making voter ID mandatory for welfare benefits could create additional barriers for rural and economically vulnerable residents. It cited cases in which elderly women agricultural workers were denied benefits after biometric machines failed to capture iris scans, while manual labourers faced authentication failures because worn fingerprints could not be matched.
The party also said many rural households did not own smartphones. It claimed that more than 13.4 crore voters had been excluded during the electoral-roll exercise, with marginalised communities, Muslims, women and economically vulnerable people disproportionately affected. Those figures and claims were presented by the CPM and were not independently established in the report.
Opposition parties and activists have also argued that exclusion from electoral rolls cannot be used to deny social welfare entitlements. They referred to a Supreme Court ruling that, according to the report, protects access to benefits including Public Distribution System rations, cash transfers and other welfare support even when a person is excluded from electoral rolls.
Sabir Ahamed, a rights activist who heads a research group studying the SIR and its impact in Bengal and other states, called the proposal “extra-Constitutional” and said it threatened the entitlements of marginalised people. The government had not issued a formal order or publicly clarified the proposal’s coverage by Wednesday night, leaving the next administrative steps uncertain.
