A woman lies writhing in pain after developing labour, yet the Karnataka hospital authorities insists on the identity of the Tamil Nadu woman in the form of Aadhaar and on failing to produce it, she was denied admission and allowed to die along with her twin new-borns! Perhaps this heartlessly ridiculous scene can get witnessed only in such a society where official formalities can override all basic norms of humanity.
Didn’t Aadhaar get conceived merely as an instrument to transfer subsidies to the eligible recipients? However, today production of Aadhaar is being religiously demanded literally from hospital maternity wards to cremation/burial ground. And of course without taking care to ensure that each and every Indian has been equipped with such a card which has been turned into the ‘be all and end all’ of an Indian’s identity.
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The insistence on Aadhaar and related technological formalities have taken the lives of many Indians in the past also.
In the latter half of 2017, a similar incident occurred in Jharkhand’s Simdega district. It is the sad story of 11-year-old Santoshi Kumari, the daughter of an impoverished family. With the school closed for a long festival season – Durga Puja to Diwali, there was no provision of mid-day meals. The family could have collected ration at subsidised rate, but food items were denied to the family because they had committed an ‘unpardonable sin’ – their ration card was yet to be linked to Aadhaar. So after suffering pangs of acute hunger for a week, little Santoshi breathed her last in the last week of September 2017.
Many poor citizens living in remote areas often get deprived of subsidised grains even after their though Ration cards are linked with Aadhaar, due due to ‘failure of the System’.
Unable to provide food to innumerable people, including the vulnerable children, but regularly coming up with cracking ‘centuries’ in the World Hunger Index, is a matter of shame.
So in this society, technology and formality is much more valuable than the lives of helpless people and their children, including those of unborn babies in the womb.
In a country where ‘Digital India’ gets flaunted with much celebration with so-called ‘nationalists’ boasting of ‘technological advancement’; compassion towards fellow human beings, especially the downtrodden, seems to be the last thing in the consciousness of this class-obsessed society.
And not only in remote Simdega of ‘backward’ Jharkhand, but the glittering modern glamour-imposed New Delhi has also seen precious lives of three ration card-less poor children getting nipped in the bud in August 2018.
Lastly, if digitisation and technological advancement get implemented in crucial sectors like subsidised food distribution (linkage of Ration card with Aadhaar), the old traditional procedures should not be discarded all together so that if the ‘system fails’, the earlier more intimate human procedures would do the job. Else it would be as suicidal as doing away with a staircase in a skyscraper while boasting of high speed elevator!
