Department of Information Technology has asked Aadhar enrolment for children belonging to age groups 0-5 years and 5-18 years to be completed by November 15. The process will be carried out by School Education and literacy department in collaboration with Unique Identification Authority of India.
“As per instruction from Union Government, we are supposed to get children up to the age of 18 years enrolled under the UID Project by the end of this year. We have asked officials to complete the process by November 15 so that we have a buffer period. Jharkhand is already on top, and we want to keep that position in future too,” said IT Secretary Sunil Kumar Barnwal.
There are presently 36,48,297 children under the age group 0-5 years, out of which 2,29,599 have been enrolled and 34,18,598 are still left out. Those belonging to the age group 5-18 years are 1,01,87,864, out of which 82,06,848 have been enrolled and 19,81,016 are yet to be registered.
He said, “There are several scheme and projects going on in the state for the welfare of infants and children, like Midday Meal Scheme, immunisation drives, Janani Suraksha Yojana, ladli lakshmi Yojana and others. We are currently exploring ways to use this advantage of children having a unique identity of their own to streamline these schemes."
He added, “There is a resource crunch and we are dealing with these hindrances. The deadline has been finalised after considering the available resources and any shortage will be taken care of. A thousand tablet computers, which are to be used to register children falling under the age group of 0-5 years, have already been provided to the responsible personnel.”
“We will be carrying out the campaign in rotation. For example, we will be covering the Anganwadi Centres in clusters. Every Anganwadi centre has 40-50 children and 100-150 children can be covered with a tablet computer in one day. So a 2-3 day camp will be enough to cover a cluster of ICDS Centres,” said Barnwal.