January 1 birth date in Aadhaar cards for 250 Pokhran villagers

What's in a day? Plenty, if you are a resident of a remote village near Pokhran in Rajasthan.

Some 250 villagers of Pabupadia in Jaisalmer district like villagers in Kanjasa, near Allahabad -- have found that their new Aadhaar cards cite their date of birth as January 1.

“It came to our notice through some locals that their Aadhaar cards had January 1 as their date of birth," Vinod Kumar Chhangani, informatics officer of the department of IT and Communication, Jaisalmer, told PTI.

The cards were checked, and it was found that about 250 people had this date on their unique identity document, he said.

The district administration convened a meeting last week to address the issue, but only 16 villagers could produce valid documents to set the record right.

Chhangani said the Aadhaar cards had recently been delivered to the people of Pabupadia, who had enrolled for cards at e-Mitra centres set up by the state government.

A similar complaint was voiced at Kanjasa village, near Allahabad, where 1000 people said their cards gave their birth dates as January 1.

Neeraj Dubey, Block Development Officer (BDO), Jasra, under which Kanjasa falls, told PTI yesterday that there was speculation the software used for the cards automatically allocated January 1 as a person's birth date if he or she was not aware of the actual date.

SDM-Pokhran Mool Singh echoed the point.

“If an applicant does not have the specific date of birth in his or her documents, the operator does not fill the column and the date is then recorded by default as January 1," he said.

"The district administration held a camp on May 18 for rectification but only 16 people could produce valid proof of their date of birth. The detail in their Aadhaar card record was corrected," Singh said.

He pointed out that most villagers had voter ID cards which cited their year of birth, but not the date.

"That is how the problem occurred,” Singh said.

He said this could only be be corrected if applicants could produce a record of their date of birth.