Village with January 1 birth date on Aadhaar asks: How many more lines to stand in?

Chechi isn’t alone. Haridwar district magistrate Deepak Rawat says all 800 Aadhaar cards enrolled at a Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) camp, set up near the Gujjar Basti in 2015, have January 1 as the birth date. In fact, the mistake was only noticed when Rawat paid a visit to the village on October 28 this year and cancelled the licence of the Aadhaar centre.

“I found the centre was overcharging for Aadhaar enrolment. On checking a few Aadhaar cards at the centre, I saw that all of them had January 1 printed as the birth date,” Rawat says.

Almost all of the affected villagers were until recently unaware of the problem. “I am illiterate, so I didn’t know what was written on my Aadhaar card. But after hearing of the issue, when I took my family’s Aadhaar cards to one of my cousins, Mohammad Rafi, who can read, I found out that my entire 13-member family had January 1 printed on the Aadhaar cards,” says Mohammad Shafi, 55, a farmer.

Shafi belongs to a generation that has spent much of their lives in forests. The Basti itself was established in 2002 to accommodate Van Gujjars displaced after their land was made part of Uttarakhand’s Rajaji National Park. A part of the village is also inhabited by members of the tribe who were moved out of the Corbett Tiger Reserve in 2014-15.

Babu Kathana, 38, is one of the few in Gujjar Basti, which has a population of up to 10,000, to have the correct date of birth on his Aadhaar card. Kathana, who has an MA in economics and runs a dairy business, is also one of the few educated people in the village. “In 2015, I had taken the required documents as proof for birth date. Maybe that’s why my birth date is correct,” Kathana says.

The UIDAI head office in New Delhi insists that there has been “no such goof-up during enrolment in Gaindi Khata village of Van Gujjars”. In a recent clarification, the authority said that Van Gujjars, being tribals, might not necessarily know their birth date or year, hence, “in such cases, as per the UIDAI enrolment policy, where a person does not know the exact date of birth and does not have a supporting document for the same, UIDAI accepts the declared birth year, or age and 1st January of that year is considered as the date of birth for the purpose of Aadhaar enrolment”.

Rawat isn’t convinced with the clarification. “Any incorrect information in an individual’s Aadhaar data could affect the person,” says the district magistrate, adding that the private contractor who organised the UIDAI camp in 2015 is untraceable.

Villagers in Gujjar Basti are now wondering if a UIDAI camp will be organised to update and correct the Aadhaar data, or whether they would have to visit one of the Common Services Centres (CSC) to sort out the issue.

Recalling the time when they stood for hours to get enrolled for Aadhaar, Shamsher, 29, another Van Gujjar from the village, asks: How many more times will we have to stand in queues? Will we have to get our Aadhaar cards made again?”