The Government of India has, so far, no proposal to link learning outcomes of each student to his/her Aadhaar number, Upendra Kushwaha, Minister of State for Human Resource Development said in the Lok Sabha, on the 24th of June 2017. This was in response to a question from MP Jose K. Mani of the Kerala Congress (Mani) party. (pdf)
The Government is conducting a Survey of Learning Outcomes as National Achievement Survey (NAS) during 2017-18, based on learning outcomes developed by the NCERT. “The Survey will be sample based and will cover all the districts in the States and UTs. The district level report is scheduled to be generated by the end of the year, 2017 and thereafter a detailed technical report by March, 2018.”
100% Aadhaar enrolment of students by 30th September 2017
A direction, however, has been issued to all States and Union Territories to ensure 100% Aadhaar enrolment of Students by 30th of September 2017. For this, the HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar said (pdf) that the ministry has:
- “prepared a format to capture the school wise Aadhaar Enrolment data through MDM-MIS Web portal.”
- District/Block level users are requested to enter data into the MDM-MIS web portal.
- A reporting format has also been developed to monitor the progress on Aadhaar enrolment data collection of each District/Block.
In addition to this, “The Government has written a letter dated 8th June 2017 to all the States/UTs except Assam, Meghalaya and J&K with a request to ensure timely data entry on the web portal on weekly basis (every Friday).” We checked, and notice (pdf) only captures top level data for each school, and not student level data.
This mandatory linkage is linked to the mid-day meal scheme. Javadekar said that “The use of Aadhaar as identity document in MDMS would bring in transparency and efficiency for delivery of services or benefits or subsidies, simplify the Government delivery processes and enable beneficiaries to get their entitlements directly to them in a convenient and seamless manner.”
Why are we checking for this?
Databases with Aadhaar linkages, for deduplication, are going to increase with time. There’s talk of a Public Credit Registry for financial data, a National Health Information Network and Health Information Exchanges planned, so three other things can’t be too far down the road: Firstly, an education registry for students – with learning outcomes and education history; secondly, an employment register for hiring, with hiring history of each individual; and a criminal database.
