Government to launch platform to track how subsidies have been beneficial at family level

NEW DELHI: What Aadhaar is to an individual, Sarvam will be to a family. The Narendra Modi government is gearing up to launch a national platform to track how subsidies have been beneficial at the family level and give each one a Sarvam number.

The Cabinet Secretariat and the Department of Electronics & Information Technology have collaborated on the project, which two senior government officials described as a futuristic step forward in Digital India that could help the government determine if the gamut of subsidies have improved the life of a family as a unit.

“Sarvam is envisaged as a universal database, cross-linked with all government subsidy schemes, Aadhaar and bank accounts for Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) on one platform for better tracking of benefits availed at a family level.
From an outcome perspective, the government would like to know that if a family avails five subsidies, whether it’s sufficient or its income level has increased,” a senior official said.

The official added that the platform will help increase savings under DBT, under which cash is transferred to the bank accounts of beneficiaries, and further plug leakages. The officials spoke to ET on condition of anonymity. The prime minister has been stressing on Rs 36,500-crore savings so far due to DBT.

ROLLOUT PLAN The plan is to roll out the Sarvam platform for the Union Territories on a test basis by September and expand it to eight states by November.

“States such as Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu have attempted to create such a family database. What they lack is…a more universal model where, if a person moves from Rajasthan to Delhi, it can operate and different systems speak to each other,” an official added.

The existing records of the Socio-Economic Caste Census and the National Population Register will be used to create the Sarvam family database. “Sarvam is being envisaged to be

implemented as a social security platform, which will significantly enhance the quality of service delivery for beneficiary schemes and also reduce the leakages,” said Neel Ratan, government and public sector leader at consultancy PwC India, which is helping the government on the Sarvam project.

A senior official said that while Aadhaar is an individual number with no connection to family or region, government subsidy schemes are provided area-wise or, as in the case of rations, to families. The government’s ultimate aim is to be able to make decisions for “more targeted subsidy” delivery, the official said.

Using Sarvam, the government can decide whether more money should be given to a family instead of providing piecemeal subsidies across schemes or whether the needs of a household can be met by increasing or decreasing the number of schemes they get.

“In a village, for example, a few people end up availing of the benefits of government schemes, while others get left out. Sarvam will provide that linkage to plug such practices and also help identify people using false identities and hence help more DBT savings,” the official said.

The Sarvam platform is being touted as the fulfilment of the main objective of Aadhaar — to universalise identity proof and to use it to plug leakages in the delivery of welfare services.

“For DBT to happen, the government ultimately has to go digital. For that to happen, we need to have a beneficiary database that is auto-updated,” said an official.

Another senior official described Sarvam as a mechanism to link, update and screen databases that are linked to Aadhaar. “It will not replace any of the existing databases.

Aadhaar seeding (linking Aadhaar to benefit cards or personal identification documents) is going to be done in meeting databases. A common database for seeding Aadhaar with NPR has already been done,” said this official.

SECURITY ASPECTS The government is also thinking about the security aspects of the platform and will put up firewalls to protect the database, details of which will be revealed only on a need-to-know basis, the official said. The inspiration for Sarvam may have come from Madhya Pradesh, which has a portal called Samagra that enables monitoring of subsidy schemes given to each individual and family in the state through a Samagra number. However, the system works only within the state.