An Aadhaar enrolment project for children aged above one year has begun in Ernakulam.
The enrolment could be done at camps being organised at 50 Akshaya Kendras across the district. The parents, who have not enrolled the names of their children so far, could make use of the opportunity and bring their kids to these centres along with their birth certificates and the Aadhaar card of parents.
The move has been initiated in the wake of the fact that Aadhaar is being increasingly incorporated into a variety of government services. In future, Aadhaar could be made mandatory for services pertaining to children such as school admission and scholarship payments.
Earlier attempts to enrol children aged below 5 years in anganwadis for Aadhaar have failed to gather momentum in Ernakulam with just 25,000 of the 2.5 lakh of the targeted group being covered in the camps. The shortcoming was attributed to a variety of reasons ranging from parents’ lack of interest to the blame game between Akshaya entrepreneurs and the Social Justice Department officials.
