Daijiworld Media Network - Bengaluru (SHP)
Bengaluru, Aug 8: Several students did not receive scholarship amount from the government in 2018, as their bank accounts were not linked with their Aadhaar.
Since September 2018, student scholarships are disbursed through the Aadhaar-based State Scholarship Portal (SSP). This move aimed to modernize the system of disbursing financial aid through a single portal and adopt a paperless application system.
It was Karnataka’s policy to make beneficiary payments only to Aadhaar-linked bank accounts under the Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT). In the year 2018, over 4.5 lac school students had not received pre-matric scholarship because their bank accounts were not seeded with Aadhaar.
With the seeding in progress, 2.6 lac students are in line to receive scholarship, with more than half being from the north Karnataka districts. The e-Governance department has now given up on the seeding process. Additional chief secretary, e-Governance, Rajeev Chawla said, “If this system can work for 42 lac kids, why not for the rest? We have the list of those students and we know which school they are in. But ultimately, if their bank accounts aren’t seeded with Aadhaar, they will not get the scholarship.”
The SSP is linked to the education department’s Student Achievement Tracking System (SATS) and contains information on 1.20 crore school students. The SSP uses a unique ID to fetch details of students for pre-matric scholarships, based on academics, caste, income details and so on.
According to a senior official, most of the students are not even listed on the SATS system, due to the non-existent bank accounts, causing failure to seed it with Aadhaar. Further, the official said, “At present, duplication in the SATS database is removed by checking the first name, middle name, last name and the date of birth separately. But complete sanitization can happen only when SATS is linked with Aadhaar. We cannot do that because we cannot deny school admission in case students don’t have Aadhaar.”