Aadhaar Showed the Day

Context: India’s gargantuan Covid vaccination drive has been facilitated by information technology backend system consisting of Aadhar, digital services revolution and financial inclusion.

India’s gargantuan Covid vaccination drive – ‘One Nation One Jab’

• On June 21, India administered a record 9 million Covid-19 vaccines across the country.
• So far, the country has administered 361.68 million vaccines — more than the population of the US.
• Challenges: Geographical spread, inadequate health infrastructure and shortage of vaccines, that had to be overcome.

The backbone: Information technology backend system

• Aadhaar infrastructure: Began in 2009 with a vision of the12-digit unique identity (UID) for all people residing in India.
• Despite some initial missteps, the experiment was pulled off, and now 1.3 billion have Aadhaar.
• Aadhaar-seeded programmes also created information highways connecting 24 crore households in the country to public distribution system (PDS).
• Deploying JAM — Jan Dhan, Aadhaar and mobile trinity: Facilitating direct benefits transfer (DBT) in 426 schemes in 2019-20 (transfer of Rs 3.81 trillion in benefits), and thereby ensuring targets, reducing leakages (savings of Rs 1.7 trillion), rationalising subsidies and enhancing efficiency. 
• For E.g. Payments for massive rural employment guarantee scheme through DBT mode.
• Digital backbone: Roll-out of digital services like -
• Unified Payments Interface (UPI): A system that enables seamless, cost-free and interoperable bank payments.
• The average number of UPI-linked transactions, which has been growing exponentially, now averages about 3 billion a month.
• Fintech revolution amidst pandemic facilitated by UPI backbone and an electronic know your customer (eKYC) using Aadhaar.
• Leveraging financial inclusion: In just six years, number of Jan Dhan accounts have grown from 12.5 crore on January 31, 2015, to 42.25 crore on April 14, 2021.