Id'entity crisis in Tamil Nadu to continue

Chennai: Aadhaar with wrong personal details and voter ID cards with misplaced photographs will continue as both the state and Centre are not serious about the public documents and their entry process. Even the recently distributed smart ration cards in Tamil Nadu has wrong entries and this is mainly due to the outsourcing of data entry and printing, said a senior government official. Most of the enumeration works in the country are done by substandard outsourced staff and executed by irrelevant departments.

“For instance, civic staff entering election commission related data, school teachers updating census details, outsourced staff handling Aadhaar cards and private contractors printing smart ration cards. This is what happens when you engage state staff for central government works or when the governments outsource the crucial data entry work,” the official explained.

The number of errors and mistakes in passports is negligible only because a single dedicated department deals the process with accountability, the official clarified. According to RTI activist V. Gopala Krishnan, the same person is having three different voter ID cards in voters list of Virugambakkam constituency. Similarly, two different IDs are there for a person in the constituency (part no. 241, page no.13). Further, the option of seeding Aadhaar number in Election Commission website was there earlier but now missing.

Be it ration card or voter ID card there are errors and duplicate entries, the activist charged.According to public elections department officials, the percentage of errors will be less than two per cent. And there are cases of death and change of address that are subjected to periodic revision. During the recent revision, 52,539 names were deleted from the voters roll and this includes deaths and multiple entries, official sources said. Official sources with Tamil Nadu Distribution System also admitted the mistakes in ration cards and attributed it due to outsourcing.