Overview
- The chief minister, who issued the directive on Thursday, May 28, ordered officials to design a single Unified Welfare Card and to begin a special drive to collect beneficiary data from all departments to populate it.
- The IT department was tasked to build an integrated system that will show department-wise benefit amounts, include citizens’ health profiles, and update records in real time such as death registrations that affect pensions.
- The government plans to use artificial intelligence to analyse the consolidated data to measure scheme impact, improve transparency, and flag beneficiaries who may be ineligible.
- Officials were told to study issuing a state-level unique ID on the lines of Aadhaar and to link the card with the SEEEPC survey; they were also asked to examine Kerala’s migration-tracking methods for passport and visa data.
- The initiative is at the planning stage with no launch date or detailed safeguards announced yet, and early steps focus on data collection, compiling contract staff records, and assigning tech-savvy officers to prepare the system.