Mobile number not needed to verify Ayushman Bharat beneficiaries: Govt on CAG report

Mobile numbers are not required to verify beneficiaries of the Ayushman Bharat Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (AB-PMJAY) and the identification process is carried out on the basis of Aadhaar details, government officials said on Wednesday, a day after the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) flagged several discrepancies in the country’s public health assurance scheme.

Among the several concerns, CAG flagged the registration of 749,820 beneficiaries against a same or invalid mobile number in the Beneficiary Identification System (BIS).

“The mobile number is recorded only for the sake of reaching out to beneficiaries in case of any requirements and for collecting feedback regarding the treatment provided,” a senior government official said, seeking anonymity.

“Multiple AB-PMJAY beneficiaries are linked with the same mobile number. These are invalid mobile numbers like 9999888877, 8888443322, etc. The matter has been portrayed to suggest that a large number of beneficiaries would have become eligible under the scheme fraudulently,” the official added.

The health scheme recognises its beneficiaries through Aadhaar identification wherein the beneficiary undergoes the process of mandatory Aadhaar based e-KYC, the official said. “The details fetched from the Aadhaar database are matched with the source database and accordingly, the request for the Ayushman card is approved or rejected. However, there is no role of mobile number in the verification process,” the official added.

The official also said that treatment cannot be withheld on the ground that the beneficiary does not carry a valid mobile number.

“Also, PM-JAY is an entitlement-based scheme and not an enrolment-based scheme and therefore, the beneficiary database is fixed and cannot be edited to add new beneficiaries. Thus, the mobile number has no role in deciding beneficiary eligibility. It is an erroneous presumption that beneficiaries can avail treatment using mobile numbers,” the official said.

On the use of same mobile number by multiple beneficiaries, the official said that initially, the mobile number was not a mandatory field during beneficiary verification and therefore, the number was not validated in the process.

“However, since there was a field for collecting mobile numbers, it is possible that some random 10-digit number was entered by field level workers in some cases. However, this wouldn’t impact either the correctness of the beneficiary verification process or the validity of the beneficiaries’ claim,” the official said.

Necessary changes have been made in the current IT portal used by the National Health Authority (NHA) for capturing only valid mobile numbers, in case the same is possessed by the beneficiary, the official added.

The NHA has also provided three additional options i.e., fingerprint, iris scan and face-authentication, for beneficiary verification along with OTP, of which fingerprint-based authentication is most used, the official said.