Examine how digital and data-infrastructure gaps (Aadhaar seeding, internet connectivity) in schools can undermine equitable delivery of welfare benefits under DBT.

Direct Benefit Transfer routes scholarships, uniform and mid-day meal entitlements to students through Aadhaar-linked accounts, making the school the first node of welfare delivery. UDISE+ 2025-26 records 24.72 crore students and 90.2% Aadhaar seeding, but the residual gaps sit precisely where deprivation is deepest — turning a technical shortfall into an equity failure [1].

How the gaps arise

• Seeding gaps: about one in ten student records remains unseeded, with seeding far below the national average in several hill and North-Eastern States where Aadhaar enrolment and connectivity are weakest [1].
• Connectivity gaps: only 67.4% of schools have internet and 69.9% have computers — roughly one in three schools cannot upload, validate or correct student data in real time [1].
• Capacity gaps: data entry rests on teachers already stretched at secondary level (PTR 21), leaving errors in name–bank–Aadhaar matching uncorrected [1].

How this undermines equitable DBT

• Exclusion errors: since Aadhaar is the preferred targeting key for DBT beneficiary identification, an unseeded or mismatched record means a genuine child is invisible to the payment system [2].
• Delayed transfers: failed e-KYC or dormant accounts stall scholarships at the very stage where the secondary dropout rate is still 7.0%, raising the cost of continuing school [1].
• Regressive incidence: the same tribal, hill and remote districts face both low seeding and low connectivity, so digital exclusion compounds existing social disadvantage rather than correcting it.
• Constitutional dilution: entitlements flowing from Article 21A and the RTE Act, 2009 become contingent on digital plumbing rather than on the child's right [3].

Thus the DBT gain in efficiency is realised unevenly unless the data layer itself is made equitable. Saturating school internet under PM e-Vidya and Samagra Shiksha, running camp-mode seeding drives in low-coverage districts, mandating offline/manual fallback so no child is denied for a data mismatch, and using PGI 2.0 to hold States accountable can align delivery with NEP 2020's pillars of access and equity and SDG-4 [4]. Technology must widen the entitlement, never ration it.