Maharashtra: A ‘golden record’ of citizens to transfer welfare benefits — and plan more

The government will create this platform after merging 56 databases through 377 agencies and bodies — including zila parishads, police, municipal corporations, collectorates, and the health, education and finance departments — in order to create a 360-degree profile of any particular citizen, said an official aware of the project.

The government believes the hub will help it reduce irregularities in social welfare schemes.

Currently, the state uses the Maharashtra Direct Benefit Transfer (MahaDBT) Portal to transfer benefits and subsidies — scholarships, loan waivers, agricultural support, etc.
But there are challenges with this. Multiple departments manage legacy systems and the beneficiary details are scattered. There is no single platform where data is readily available for scheme planning and beneficiary identification.

During the Covid lockdown, for instance, the government was initially unable to provide relief to sections like auto and taxi drivers, construction workers and other workers as it either did not have bank details of all the beneficiaries or had no way to verify their identity.

The official mentioned above said: “The details of the most.of the beneficiaries are also incomplete, inaccurate, not updated or available at all. There is a lack of unique identifiers for identifying various entities. There is also difficulty in identification of family or household, monitoring of the quantum of benefits paid at various levels of entity — for example on individual-level, family-level, location-wise and ability to cross-check data (such as beneficiary details, benefits claimed, etc.) with databases of other government agencies.”

And even though the use of Aadhaar data and the MahaDBT Portal has proved useful for transferring benefits, more challenges remain with the process.

“In the present system, a 360-degree view of the beneficiary and state social benefit system is not available. There is no facility to plan and administer schemes. Historical data and analysis of payouts made before linking of Aadhaar data is not available. The portal also maintains records of only registered citizens — it is not an exhaustive database of all eligible residents. The data primarily pertains to individuals and not organisations. Most importantly, there is also a possibility of leakages,” said the official.
The identification of beneficiaries irrespective of their movement across various locations also becomes an issue.

“We are in the process of appointing a system integrator who will design, develop, deploy and maintain MH-UCDH. The platform will have the details of citizen’s demographic information and master record of every citizen,” said the official.a