Aadhaar Validity: Maharashtra and UP Tighten Rules

On November 27, Maharashtra's revenue minister made an announcement that a number of birth and death certificates issued recently only on the basis of Aadhaar verification would be cancelled. The news agency ANI posted on X, 'Along with this, instructions have been given to take action against the officers who have issued these certificates till now. The Revenue Department has issued a 16-point verification guideline to all Tehsildars, Sub-Divisional Officers, District Commissioners, and Divisional Commissioners.' Uttar Pradesh also did something similar the next day. It announced that Aadhaar will not be accepted as proof of date of birth and that it is not an approved record for the government.

If the reason for both is the widespread fraudulent use of Aadhaar, then it is also an indication of how far the unique identity has come from what it once promised. Measures like biometrics were supposed to prevent exactly such misuse, but even now there is a kind of dilemma in how Aadhaar is viewed. It is still ubiquitous for all sorts of documentation, from KYC of banks, to getting a new mobile connection. In these areas the government is not only fine with Aadhaar but encourages and even forces it, while for its own purposes it demands a higher bar of legitimacy.

An indication of the scale of how much work remains could be seen on November 26, when UIDAI announced that as many as two crore Aadhaar numbers of dead people had been deactivated 'as part of a nationwide clean-up effort to maintain the continued accuracy of the Aadhaar database.' With the government increasingly suspicious of Aadhaar as proof of anything, the question remains of what exactly will be its role in the future. For the moment, it looks like just one more of the many documents that Indians need to carry, but by itself doesn’t count when it matters.