How Kerala used Aadhaar data to expose govt staff pilfering welfare benefits

Aadhaar data held the key to exposing the 1,458 assistant professors, wardens, clerks and gazetted officers who were found to be receiving social welfare pension meant exclusively for members of extremely low-income families.

The finance department integrated data from the Service and payroll administrative repository of Kerala (SPARK) with Sevana software, which is used for disbursing welfare pension, to exclude government staff who received monthly welfare pensions as well as regular pay from their respective departments.

The Information Kerala Mission, which handles the Sevana software, ran tools to cross-match the same Aadhaar numbers seeded for salary payment and pension disbursal.

"Once this was done, beneficiaries who had furnished the same biometric data for wages and pension were enlisted. In SPARK, every employee has a unique permanent employee number (PEN), which helps the departments get details about any staff. We had a full list with all the required information on each employee who received pension and salary," a senior finance department official said. The annual mustering process to weed out ineligible beneficiaries, which mandated the collection of biometric data, enabled the collection of Aadhaar data. With pension and payroll portals being integrated for data cleansing, Aadhaar numbers showed up on both portals, leading to the erring staff.

The officials said that respective departments would levy the amount with interest from the staff found receiving the pension illegally. Each department will fix the rate of interest.

Some of the staff were found to have been receiving pension and salary for more than a year. Officials said it needs to be probed further whether all the people on the list willingly committed the fraud or had completed the mustering process and then joined government service. The department also needs to find out how much money has been lost so far through the disbursal of pension to ineligible beneficiaries.

While a formal classification has yet to be done, many government staff identified as unauthorised beneficiaries of welfare pensions received either widow or disability pensions.

The finance department has issued seven general criteria for receiving welfare pension. The key conditions included 1) the applicant's annual family income shall not exceed Rs 1 lakh and that the applicant shall not be paying income tax; and 2) the applicant shall not receive salary/pension/family pension from the central government or other state governments. Other conditions pertained to owning property, vehicles, and family pension.

A widow pension is given to those whose husbands are dead or have been missing for more than seven years. While a death certificate has to be produced in the first instance, if the man has been missing, a certificate issued by the revenue department has to be furnished. The number, date, and name of the local body have to be registered on Sevana software, and the certificate has to be uploaded.

Sources point out that this is not the first time the state government has noticed welfare pension pilferage. In 2020, the finance department called it a serious breach of conduct and directed beneficiaries to report the matter to local bodies and cancel the pension.

Erring staffers were asked to refund the amount and enter details on Sevana software. The drawing and disbursing officer was entrusted with deducting the amount from such staff's salaries and depositing it in the account of Kerala Social Security Pension Ltd. Department-level disciplinary action was also directed against them in 2020.