Aadhaar linking, a nightmare for commonman

Hyderabad : ‘Aadhaar’, a noted word in every mouth from recent days. Though the Apex court has extended the deadline for the linkage of Aadhaar number with services like PAN, mobile, bank accounts and other services the people are facing a Herculean task.

Recently, the Supreme Court extended the deadline for Aadhaar linkage from December 31 to March 31. Almost 80-90 percentage of card holders are now forced to re-visit the Aadhaar centres to get upgraded bio-metric and demographic details, which is taking weeks together to get their turn.

According to the Income Tax Department, the details available with the department must match the Aadhaar details like spellings, including surname and date of birth. But in most of the cases the Aadhaar holders names were wrongly mentioned in the card, in these cases the income tax department is not accepting the linkage and asking them to upload perfect details.

In these cases the card holders are again visiting the Aadhaar centres with their cards respectively and taking appointment by waiting for hours together. A senior citizen, K Mahipathi Rao, from Vidayanagar approached his chartered accountant for linking his Aadhaar number with his IT details but it shows his name was not matching. He later went to the Aadhaar centre to correct his name as Katikanani Mahipathy Rao instead of Katikaneni Mahi Pathi Rao. “Since September I applied three times for correction of my name but every time after ten days I am receiving a message stating that “due to technical reason application was rejected”, I don’t know what to do,” he said.

He also asked how he could know what the technical snag was and to where he had to go to know the real reason. On the other hand, at frequent intervals he was getting alerts from the IT Department and banks to link his Aadhaar.

“It is our duty to just upload the information mentioned in the application, we don’t know why they are rejecting, there is no proper mechanism to consult the right person for the rejected applications,” said Srikanth, Aadhaar centre operator of Vidyanagar. This is not the only case, every day the Aadhaar centres are flooded with similar observations.

When people are trying to contact the toll free number ‘1947’ to register their concerns or to know about the status of the application the toll free number is disconnecting mid-way, said G Rakesh of Lal Darwaza in old city. He said to change the address on his father’s card he almost worked two months but in vain. Finally, after trying for more than 100 times to get through to the toll free number they told him that the card was in an inactive status and after making it active by resubmitting the bio-metric details he could update the address.

To address these types of issues the people are demanding opening of special counters in each municipality area so that people could approach them and find a solution, said a senior citizen, K Chandrashekhar Rao, of Meerpet. Adding, he said that the Aadhaar centres were not accepting applications of senior citizens as it would take time to perfectly upload their bio-matric and iris details.