IS AADHAAR STILL WORK-IN-PROGRESS?

ON 2 MARCH, 2025, as I was going to cast my vote for the local municipal elections, I looked at the voter slips dropped at home by some candidate’s staff and noticed that my age had been mentioned as 81 even though I had turned 84, last month.

- By Krishan Kalra

Same was the case with all other slips for the family! So, the data had not been updated for at least three years.

Of course, there was another minor error - the polling booth address said ‘American MuntsrI School’; anyway I won't grudge them the liberty of wrongly spelling ‘Montessori’ even though the same school has hosted our polling booths for all elections for the last two decades! If indeed the Aadhar and its linkages were working properly, my age on the voter slip should’ve been corrected automatically!

According to Google, the roots of Aadhar can be traced back to the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government which - in the wake of the Kargil war - proposed a ‘Multipurpose National Identity Card’ in 2001, to be issued on the basis of a National register of Indian Citizens, so as to stem illegal immigration. If I have understood correctly, the Aadhar card was to become a ‘unique single identity’ that would subsume all other identities like voter id, ration card etc., perhaps even PAN.