Aadhaar card duplication: UIDAI cancels nearly 6 lakh duplicate Aadhaar ID

UIDAI has canceled nearly six lakh duplicate Aadhaar cards. Action has also been taken on Illegal websites offering Aadhaar services.

UIDAI added “face” for biometric verification to Aadhaar card.

The Aadhaar card is one of the mandatory documents used for identification in India to source various government services. However, duplicate Aadhaar card generation has been spotted by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) following which the department has canceled 598,999 duplicate Aadhaar cards. Minister of State in Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar informed about the same in Parliament on July 20, 2022 while replying to a query on Aadhaar card duplication in the Lok Sabha. He shared that the steps have been taken by UIDAI to address the duplicate Aadhaar generation issue and added that an extra verification feature "face" has been added to the Aadhaar card.

The minister said, "The demographic matching mechanism has been further strengthened, biometric matching of all new enrollments is ensured and 'face' has been included as a new modality (in addition to fingerprint and iris) for de-duplication."

Apart from verification, facial recognition in Aadhaar is also used for authenticating pension verification details for pensioners. As of now more than 100,000 pensioners have been authenticated.

Responding to another such query on illegal websites offering Aadhaar related services, Chandrasekhar said that UIDAI has also served notices to these websites. He said, "UIDAI has served notices to the owners of the websites concerned to restrain themselves from providing such unauthorized services by any means, and also to hosting service providers to block defiant websites with immediate effect."

As many as 11 websites have been stopped from offering such services since January 2022, shared the minister. He informed that these websites do not have rights to enroll a resident and modify biometric information or link the mobile number of the resident in existing Aadhaar. The users must visit the UIDAI official website as well as authorized Aadhaar centers for all the Aadhaar related queries from updating mobile number to address and photograph.