Aadhaar slips up, letters come with dog, tree photos

In perhaps one of the strangest government goof-ups India has seen till date, thousands of people across the country have received Aadhaar letters with photographs of trees, animals or buildings in place of their own, reports Chetan Chauhan. Aadhaar's errors

Updated on: Apr 7, 2013, 01:49:48 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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In perhaps one of the strangest government goof-ups India has seen till date, thousands of people across the country have received Aadhaar letters with photographs of trees, animals or buildings in place of their own.

Fifty-two-year-old south Delhi resident Ashish Kumar Mathur, for instance, was thrilled when he got his letter earlier than expected. But his joy was short-lived as he opened the envelope and saw that the letter carried the photo of a tree against his name.

The Aadhaar letter provides a person with a unique identification number that becomes a valid proof of identity to avail of several services such as getting a passport or opening a bank account. But the document has no value if the photo is of a person different from the one whose name and address it mentions — and even less so, one could say, if the photo is of an inanimate thing.

Having said that, the case of the daughter of Andhra Pradesh resident MS Reddy is no better for having the photo of a dog on her Aadhaar letter. “It is a disgrace,” Reddy wrote angrily on his blog, raising questions about the entire Aadhaar project.

The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) said in response to a Right to Information (RTI) application filed by this reporter that 3,858 Aadhaar letters with photographs of non-humans have been detected so far.

In addition, 14,817 cases of Aadhaar letters bearing photos of wrong people have been detected. “I am 71 and my Aadhaar letter has the photo of a person in his early twenties,” said Punjab resident Om Prakash Syngal.

In its reply, the UIDAI attributed the goof-up to an error in the printing software, which, the authority claimed, accidentally picked random pictures from the computer being used. “The application used an incorrect algorithm to choose the photo,” it said, adding that a process to identify such cases was initiated once the reason for the glitch was identified.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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