What do you understand by Aadhar seeding? Discuss its various methods and benefits, particularly in improvement of India's Public Distribution System.

Aadhaar seeding is a procedure by which the Unique Identifications issued by the UIDAI are included in the database of service providers so that they can used the Aadhaar identity for authentication during service delivery. Some of the examples include linking with the MGNREGA scheme or the insurance carriers.
Here two methods of seeding are being used:

• Inorganic seeding- Under this mechanism, a digitalized database of beneficiaries is maintained. This data is collected from the KYR+ data issued by the enrollment agencies like employment exchanges. Then a comparison is made with this KYR+ data and the Aadhaar name. After this, the EID database is linked to the UID database.
• Organic seeding-This is a direct method by which the department officials interact with the beneficiaries to collect their details of UID. These include the camps, door to door campaigns, fair price shops etc.

At present, the Public Distribution System is suffering from high inefficiency as the benefits never trickle down to the needy. This is either due to lack of information or due to corruption and red tapism. These problems can be solved to a great extent by this mechanism. It will help the government to maintain an updated database where:

• Names of dead or non-existent beneficiaries will be removed.
• The beneficiaries who claim benefits more than once can be eliminated.
• False beneficiaries using others names cannot get the benefit.