Chittaranjan Tembhekar | TNN | Nov 28, 2016, 06.37 AM IST
MUMBAI: Even as the government is all set to link all your financial transactions and movable and immovable property details with your Aadhaar card, yet another incident in Mumbai of 'forged' cards raises doubt over safety of such a move.
However, Aadhaar administration said such cases did not pose any danger to safety of personal data and assets.
A week ago, Shrinivas Pandian, owner of a daily provisions shop in Saki Naka, was in for a surprise when a sanitary worker along the Asalpha metro station gave him two Aadhaar cards which he found abandoned on the footpath.
Shrinivas, who initially decided to submit them in the police station, was shocked to see that all the details on both the cards, except the photographs and dates of birth, were same.
"I decided to highlight this on Citizen Reporter so that both the police as well as the Aadhaar administration look into the issue," he said. Several other cities have also reported such cases in the past.
TOI's Citizen Reporter team later contacted officials of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UDAI) and produced the photographs of the cards which Pandian uploaded on the portal. The officials immediately took note and found from their records that one of the cards was digitally altered.
A senior official said it was a clear case of duplication by adopting fradulent methods, but added that any such forgery does not corrupt the original data secure with the UDAI. "The personal data for every such record is also linked to a person's fingerprints as well as the iris scan, which are unique in nature and hence there is no question of misuse," he said.
The cards, which are numbered 416405252907, bear the name Bhajjan Hari Ram Gautam and an address from Uttar Pradesh's Rampur in Shravasti, but show different photographs and dates of birth.
While the photoshopped version of the card has a photo of a youth, the original version has the photo of a child with a slogan of UDAI written below in Marathi.
According to UDAI officials, for any misuse of data collected under Aadhaar, a threeyear imprisonment is prescribed as per UDAI law.