A district collector working in the Manipur government has shared an eye-opening account about how the lack of an Aadhaar card in the present context can eventually threaten the very existence of a person.
Taking to Twitter to narrate a personal incident, IAS officer Kannan Gopinathan said he was approached by a young man at his office who was in tears as he did not have an Aadhaar card. The officer went on to narrate how the young man's attempts to enrol for Aadhaar six to seven times from 2013 to 2018 went in vain.
Confident that he would be able to resolve the man's problem, Gopinathan said that he logged to the resident portal of the UIDAI website only to be shown the message 'Rejected due to enrolment error' for all the times the man attempted to register himself.
The collector then took the matter up with a senior UIDAI official, who purportedly told him that such an issue "happens in a small percentage of cases" and is "very complicated to resolve".
While praising the benefits arising out of Aadhaar, Gopinathan did add that the project can end up proving to be a matter of life and death for individuals.
And I feel it is this, the killer efficiency and ruthless ubiquitousness that makes the whole Aadhaar project a scary prospect. Not just the possibility of a potential misuse!Kannan Gopinathan
Notably, on 27 March, UIDAI CEO Ajay Bhushan Pandey concluded his presentation to the Supreme Court on the technological framework for Aadhaar with a remarkable admission: the UIDAI’s statistics show that Aadhaar-based biometric authentication for government services has a 12 percent failure rate.
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