Though the level of fraud in social welfare schemes as well as various subsidy programmes run by the government has reduced enormously ever since the use of Aadhaar biometrics increased, but as the scholarship scam in Jharkhand showed, there is enough scope for corruption even now; in the case of Rajasthan, this newspaper detailed the massive leakages in the health insurance scheme that was a precursor to the all-India Ayushman Bharat scheme. One reason, of course, is that though the Aadhaar rollout is nearly universal, there are enough schemes that do not insist on this being used mandatorily even today. While the government needs to ensure that Aadhaar authentication is mandatory for all schemes at the earliest, according to a report in The Indian Express, the IT ministry is planning to conduct trial runs for the use of artificial intelligence (AI)—data analytics, to begin with—in various welfare schemes. The ministry plans to use the service in some welfare and scholarships schemes initially and shall unveil a national implementation plan later. The development also comes on the back of Niti Aayog wanting to create a cloud infrastructure, AIRAWAT, replete with high-level AI applications which can be leveraged by government agencies to run data analysis.
Though the level of fraud in social welfare schemes as well as various subsidy programmes run by the government has reduced enormously ever since the use of Aadhaar biometrics increased, but as the scholarship scam in Jharkhand showed, there is enough scope for corruption even now; in the case of Rajasthan, this newspaper detailed the massive leakages in the health insurance scheme that was a precursor to the all-India Ayushman Bharat scheme. One reason, of course, is that though the Aadhaar rollout is nearly universal, there are enough schemes that do not insist on this being used mandatorily even today. While the government needs to ensure that Aadhaar authentication is mandatory for all schemes at the earliest, according to a report in The Indian Express, the IT ministry is planning to conduct trial runs for the use of artificial intelligence (AI)—data analytics, to begin with—in various welfare schemes. The ministry plans to use the service in some welfare and scholarships schemes initially and shall unveil a national implementation plan later. The development also comes on the back of Niti Aayog wanting to create a cloud infrastructure, AIRAWAT, replete with high-level AI applications which can be leveraged by government agencies to run data analysis.
