Students across the State will no longer have to run here and there to obtain an Aadhaar card as camps are being organised on the premises of schools by the State government.
Over the last two weeks, the Education Department, along with Centre for e-Governance (CEG), launched Aadhaar enrolment drives across the State and plan to enrol 50.8 lakh children in government, aided, and private schools for those between the age of five and 18. This, despite the Supreme Court verdict that Aadhaar card should not be made mandatory to get government subsidies, the Ministry of Human Resource Development is pushing State governments to ensure that all students apply for Aadhaar. Currently, the drives have begun in most parts of the State, except Bengaluru.
While the kits are being mobilised from the e-governance and Nada Kacheri offices, the Education Department officers at the district level are compiling a school-wise list. The department is planning to hold a camp in every school. But in schools with few students, it will hold a camp for two or more schools in the neighbourhood.
Lokeshwara S.M., an employee at Hassan Public School where a camp was held last week, said that it was organised to ensure that 130 out of the total 748 children enrolled for Aadhaar. “It is a major relief for parents and teachers as they do not have to go elsewhere to get the cards done. All 130 students were registered and given acknowledgements. We have been told that they will get their Aadhaar cards in two weeks,” he said.
Despite the department conducting camps, many middlemen are trying to “capitalise” on the situation and are asking parents to pay to register for Aadhaar.
Yashodamma (name changed), who works as a domestic worker in Kempapura, Hebbal, said that her son’s private school was “pressurising” her to ensure that her 5-year-old gets an Aadhaar card. “The school authorities have said that I have to get it done at the earliest. So I paid Rs. 50 and an agent, who took us to a centre where they clicked my son’s photo, said he would get it done as quickly as possible,” she said.
Despite clarifying in the High Court that Aadhaar for schoolchildren was optional, many schools had warned students that they would not be able to sit for the exams or submit their assignments if they failed to submit Aadhaar card number. P.C. Jaffer, State Project Director of Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, said there was no need for parents to go anywhere for their wards’ Aadhaar card and that school managements should not pressurise them to do so.
