Disk crash setback for Aadhaar

If you have enrolled under the home ministry's national population register (NPR) or more than six months ago and have not received your unique identification or Aadhaar number, there is a possibility of you not getting the number.

Updated on: Feb 12, 2013, 23:25:59 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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If you have enrolled under the home ministry's national population register (NPR) or more than six months ago and have not received your unique identification or Aadhaar number, there is a possibility of you not getting the number.

The reason for this is disk failure resulting in your Aadhaar number not being generated.

Aadhaar generation of thousands of people across India has failed because of an error in disks in which enrollment data was stored and provided to unique identification authority for de-duplication -- the technical process before Aadhaar number is created.

Government officials said some of the hard disks provided by the ministry's census commissioner and private enrollers of UIDAI had a problem because of which part of the data got corrupted. Each disk had demographic data of around 20,000 people.

But, the government has remained silent on the technical failure and the only way to know about it was by logging on
to the UIDAI website.

"I have been waiting for my Aadhaar number for almost six months. Now, I am told that my enrollment has failed. The government did not inform me," said Deepinder Singh at a UIDAI enrollment centre in north Delhi, where he had gone to inquire about his Aadhaar number.

There is a mad rush number in several states as government has linked welfare measures with Aadhaar number. The enrollers at UIDAI centers have been telling people to wait not knowing that de-duplication has failed, creating confusion for people.

Those who have checked their Aadhaar status on the UIDAI website were able to learn about the hard reality. However, UIDAI does not have a figure for such people.

The disk failure error may not happen for those enrolling now, UIDAI officials said.

The authority has provided online facility to all enrollers including NPR to upload the demographic data of residents through a new tamper-proof sync mechanism.

"The uploading facility can be done only through authorised computers," an official said.

The new mechanism, officials said, would fasten the Aadhaar generation process.

"Aadhaar number would be generated within a fortnight if the demographic data passes through all technical parameters," the official said.

The earlier system took at least a month to generate an Aadhaar number and even more if delivery of hard disk took time.

Of the six crore persons enrolled by NPR Aadhaar numbers of around four crore have been generated.

Officials said the delay in generating these Aadhaar numbers was because of duplication as substantial number of people have enrolled twice -- once through UIDAI and then under the NPR regime.

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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