Goof ups galore during Aadhaar registration

Providing citizens with Aadhaar cards was one of the biggest projects undertaken by the government. However, the process of providing citizens with unique identities has seen several goof ups so far.

In a certain instance, an empty chair was printed as the applicant's photo on the Aadhaar card.

In other cases, there have been cards generated with pictures of an empty chair, a tree or a dog as the applicant's picture. Here, the operator is said to have copied the wrong photo.

In some cases, operators registered their own fingerprints in place of the citizen enrolling for the card. 

Surprisingly, there were reports that in some places, UIDAI officials refused to take photos of women who wanted to enrol, for not wearing dupattas.

This is not all, the data registered by citizens has been lost by the registering agency on several occasions. The affected citizens have had to register multiple times because of this goof up.

If this was not enough, the Maharashtra government had admitted the loss of personal data of about 3 lakh applicants. The data lost included PAN and biometric information. The data is said to have been lost while it was being uploaded by the state information technology department from Mumbai to a central server of the Unique Identification Number Authority of India in Bangalore.