What is the future of one of India’s most high profile government programmes after Monday’s Supreme Court interim ruling on Aadhaar? And is there a collateral damage on election-facing UPA’s ambitious welfare schemes? The answers are starkly different. Aadhaar, unless the Supreme Court changes its ruling in the final judgement, has received a body blow. But, ironically, minus the linkage with Aaadhar, UPA’s direct benefits transfer (DBT) programme can perhaps get a boost.

a quick and dirty story on the fallouts of the supreme court’s interim ruling barring states from making aadhaar mandatory for accessing welfare. i should have added a para discussing the fallouts of doing DBTs without aadhaar. while deduplication would suffer, the instances of the old, etc, struggling to get their entitlements due to poor biometrics would also go away — assuming, that is, the new processes set in place by states do not use biometrics at all.