Aadhaar card holders in big trouble as UIDAI system becomes inaccessible even as EPF, PAN linking deadline looms

The IT system at UIDAI (Unique Identification Authority of India) has been down for more than week and Aadhar users have been left in a fix. And the problem is particularly critical since the deadline to link UIDAI identity details to the Employees’ Provident Fund Accounts and the income tax department’s Permanent Account Number (PAN) has been closing in. Also, the new Income Tax portal is yet to become fully functional and this had caused more trouble for users who are trying to link their Aadhar to PAN by September 30. All EPFO members are also required to link their Aadhaar cards to be able to continue to deposit PF contributions.

Even for users who just want to update Aadhar details or correct mismatches with identity documents it has been troublesome on the UIDAI site with several uses complaining that attempts to update details are not going through online or offline at Aadhar centres due to technical issues. An official source has confirmed that the systems are down due to some glitches. “The system downtime impacted multiple cities,” he said. However, it was not clear if this was a national outage and whether the systems are now back online. UIDAI did not respond to queries and a senior officer at the NIC, the government’s IT arm, said that they were not aware of any issue.

According to the UIDAI website, in order to link Aadhaar with PAN, ideally, the citizen's demographic details such as name, gender, date of birth, should match in both the documents. “In case of any minor mismatch in the name provided by the taxpayer when compared to the actual data in Aadhaar, a One Time Password (Aadhaar OTP) will be sent to the mobile registered with Aadhaar. Taxpayers should ensure that the date of birth and gender in PAN and Aadhaar are exactly same,” the website says.

In rare cases where the Aadhaar name is completely different from the on the PAN, then the linking will fail and the taxpayer will be asked to change the name in the database of either Aadhaar or PAN.