E-aadhaar cleared but still in slow lane

With the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) making electronic Aadhaar letter on a par with the printed letter, there is a sudden spurt to download the form, resulting in regular system failure, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Apr 10, 2013, 02:30:01 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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With the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) making electronic Aadhaar letter on a par with the printed letter, there is a sudden spurt to download the form, resulting in regular system failure.

Electronic Aadhaar is a system through which a person can download his or her Aadhaar letter after receiving automatic one-time password. This has helped the UIDAI to reduce complaints on account of residents not receiving Aadhaar letters through posts even months after enrolment.

As many government agencies were refusing to accept e-Aadhaar letters as a valid document to avail of government services, the UIDAI recently clarified that the electronic letter was on a par with the printed document.

“The issue has been considered and it has been decided that e-Aadhaar be treated as a valid document as it has been digitally certified... The document is digitally signed using certificate issued by National Informatics Center, as per the IT Act, 2000,” said a circular issued by the authority

“I have been trying for over 10 days but am unable to download my e-Aadhaar letter,” said Inderjit Singh, a resident of Janakpuri in west Delhi. “Every time I have tried, it says the server is down.”

The UIDAI officials admitted to receiving a large number of complaints on downloading the letter from its special portal, “We have scaled up the system to cope with the increased traffic,” a senior UIDAI official said.

On average, two to three lakh people visit the UIDAI’s public information portal every day to download the letter. “The traffic was less initially but it is on rise with coverage of Aadhaar enrollment increasing,” a senior UIDAI official said.

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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