People get Aadhaar letters with photos of trees, buildings and animals

Hindustan Times: New Delhi: Sunday, April 07, 2013.

The exuberance of 52-year-old south Delhi resident Ashish Kumar Mathur of getting a unique identification or Aadhaar number early was short-lived. Reason: Aadhaar letter had photograph of trees around a government building against his name.

Aadhaar is a unique photo identity based on one’s ten finger-prints and eye scan and is a valid proof of identity for availing several services including passport and opening a bank account. If the photo on Aadhaar letter is not of the person whose address is mentioned, the document has no value.

Mathur was not the only one to have been caught in this piquant situation.

Nandan Nilekani led Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) said in a reply to a Right To Information (RTI) application of this reporter that around 3,858 Aadhaar letters having a non-human photographs have been detected so far.

Mathur is still better-off than an Andhra Pradesh resident MS Reddy who was “shell shocked” to find photograph of a dog on his daughter’s Aadhaar letter. “It is a disgrace,” he said in a blog, while questioning whether the UPA government’s ambitious project can actually deliver or not. UIDAI officials admitted that many of these Aadhaar letters had photographs of animals, trees and buildings.

The UIDAI, in its RTI reply said it happened because of an error in Aadhaar letter printing software. The software accidentally picked random pictures from the computer rather than a specific zone. “This was because the print application was using an incorrect algorithm to choose Aadhaar photo in the period specified,” the authority said. 

Once the reason for the glitch was identified, the UIDAI initiated a process to identify photo mismatches in Aadhaar letters. The months of hard work at UIDAI’s Bangalore data centre revealed 19,493 such cases. Of them, the most – 14,817 – were of Aadhaar letters having photograph of some other person. “I am 71 and I got Aadhaar letter with a photograph of a person in early twenties,” said Punjab resident Om Prakash Syngal.

Aadhaar photo error:

·         Total photo mismatch: 19,493

·         Aadhaar photos not matching: 14,817

·         Aadhaar photo not human: 3858

·         Aadhaar numbers generated: 31 crore

·         Aadhaar numbers dispatched: 25 crore