ISB- Digital identity Research Initiative | 2019
This data brief characterizes the main attributes of Aadhaar-enabled Public Distribution System (AePDS) in Haryana and reports on the relative impact of essential components of the AePDS system on allocation of entitlements to the beneficiaries of the PDS system during the month of June 2018. A run-through of findings from authentications between November 2017 to November 2018 is also presented in this study.
The Aadhar authentication attempts for approximately 2M ration cards were made each month in Haryana’s AePDS from November 2017 to November 2018. Faridabad district was observed to have more than twice the average failure rate in the state during this period. Half of all failures are captured in the last week of each month.
We found that the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI)’s Aadhaar authentication services to be extremely responsive. More than 98% of all successful authentication requests received a response from UIDAI within two seconds of their generation at the ePOS machines and 78% out of these were received within one second. Only finger-print based biometric authentication was used for identification purposes.
Aadhaar enabled public distribution system (AePDS) has three major components. The ePOS machine at the PDS shop, the state PDS server, and the Aadhaar Authentication Services managed and provided by UIDAI. For efficient delivery of Aadhaar authentication enabled services to the beneficiaries these three components must function in tandem with high efficiency. The state PDS server contains the repository of the digitized ration cards of all the beneficiaries and logs each transaction generated by the ePOS device present in the PDS shop. Even temporary unavailability of the state PDS server greatly impacts the time taken to authenticate a beneficiary. We found that the PDS entitlement offtake in Haryana is characterized by abrupt surge in authentications attempts in the second half of each month. Any disruption of services by PDS server during this period aggravates the inconvenience caused to beneficiaries.
During the month of June 2018, the state PDS server of Haryana was found to be frequently inaccessible by the ePOS devices, especially on days with high number of authentication attempts and greater number of active ePOS devices.
These observations call for a detailed study of the efficacy of various components of AePDS to identify technical issues or bottlenecks in different parts of the authentication ecosystem and gain insights for improved strategic management of the authentication system.
Ashwini Chhatre is an Associate Professor of Public Policy and currently serves as the Executive Director of the Bharti Institute of Public Policy (BIPP) at the Indian School of Business (ISB). Professor Chhatre is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research interests broadly centre on the dynamic cross-scale interactions between governance, economic development, and environmental protection. He relocated to India from the US in 2014 to join the faculty at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad. He spent 13 years in the US, including five in graduate school at Duke University, where he was awarded a PhD in Political Science. In 2006-07, Professor Chhatre became the first Giorgio Ruffolo Post-doctoral Fellow in Sustainability Science at Harvard University, before joining the Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.
Between completing his BA in Economics from the University of Delhi in 1990 and starting his PhD at Duke University, he spent 11 years working in different parts of India, primarily as a community organiser and social activist on issues related to natural resources such as land, forests, and water. A background in Economics, graduate training in Political Science, and a long-standing engagement with scholarship in Geography, Anthropology, Landscape Ecology, and Environmental History ensure that his research is never confined to a single discipline.
Professor Chhatre’s main research interests lie in exploring the intersection of democracy, environment, and development, with a focus on decentralised forest governance, climate change vulnerability and adaptation, and multifunctional agriculture. Over the past 20 years, the scope of his research projects has ranged from household-level to global analysis, consistently bridging research, policy, and practice.
He was the founding Editor-in-Chief of World Development Perspectives (2016-19), served as Senior Editor of Conservation Letters (2009-2014), and has published one book and several articles in leading journals including Science, and PNAS.
