JHARKHAND — Every few months since 2017, Tarannum Khatun makes the same pilgrimage: An hour-long ride to Ranchi, a queue at an Aadhaar kiosk, the same bureaucratic choreography of forms, fingerprints and the polite refusal to help.
Her daughter Sana was born at home, as most children in rural Jharkhand are. Somewhere in the chaos of an earlier enrollment drive, someone typed Sana's details incorrectly into a computer. The error has followed her ever since.
Now 13, Sana's Aadhaar card has been "blacklisted" – a term the officials use but never quite explain. Without it, she cannot get an APAAR ID, the new "Automated Permanent Academic Account Registry" that the Indian government insists will revolutionise education.
On paper, APAAR is voluntary.
In practice, teachers have warned Tarannum that Sana won't be properly counted in the national database, may struggle to receive entitlements, and will be blocked from registering for board exams.
Each trip to Ranchi ends with a new demand: bring a birth certificate, publish a gazette notification, provide proof of identity. For a rural family, these are impossibilities stacked upon impossibilities.
“It's been more than 45 days and I still haven't got any message," Tarannum says of her last visit, when workers sympathised and promised resolution within a month.
She will have to go back to the city again.
Jharkhand is treading the same path as it once did with Aadhaar. Photo: Adrija Bose
Across India, millions of children are caught in a similar trap. The Modi government's latest ambitious digitisation project – billed as "One Nation, One Student ID" – has collided with the messy reality of India's earlier digital identity scheme, Aadhaar. The result is a bureaucratic labyrinth where a single misplaced letter, a placeholder birthday, or a typo made years ago by an overworked teacher can derail a child's education.
APAAR is the newest addition to the government’s ever-growing stack of Digital Public Infrastructure. Rolled out in 2023, it was promoted as a seamless bridge across schools, colleges, and universities, linking each student’s records to one permanent number. A year later, the Ministry of Education declared victory. Over 250 million students across schools, colleges, and academic institutions had been enrolled.
Hidden beneath the headline figures are millions still uncounted, their academic futures hanging in limbo for want of a single digital record that is, officially, "voluntary." It is a crisis born of grand technological visions stumbling over India's complex social realities.
The consequences are starkly visible in Jharkhand, the state where Aadhaar itself was first aggressively rolled out more than 15 years ago, and where those same mistakes are now being repeated.
Broken Systems Create One Impossible Maze
To understand why generating a student ID has become insurmountable for thousands of teachers and families across the country, one must first understand how three separate government databases are supposed to speak to each other – and how catastrophically they fail.
The first system is the oldest: handwritten school registers, where teachers record each child's name and date of birth at admission. In rural areas, where many parents lack documentation, teachers often improvise. January 1 becomes a convenient default birthday. Names are spelled phonetically, based on how they sound rather than any official record.
The second is UDISE+, the Unified District Information System for Education, where all school data is supposed to live digitally. Every academic year, teachers must transfer information from school registers into this portal. Each student gets a PEN (Permanent Education Number). This is where errors multiply — overworked teachers make typos, and those typos become permanent digital records.
The final system is Aadhaar, India’s controversial biometric identity scheme, now the world's largest. Years after school enrollment, families get Aadhaar cards made. The operator at the Aadhaar center types in what they hear or see on whatever documents parents bring.
To generate an APAAR ID, all three must align perfectly.
"The student's name, date of birth and Aadhaar number recorded in the school/UDISE+ must exactly match the Aadhaar record," explains Gorakh Kumar Singh, hired as a computer teacher at a private school in Jharkhand but who now spends most of his time wrestling with documentation. "I am the only one who knows how to operate computers."
One extra letter. One missing space. A made-up birthday. Any of these renders APAAR generation impossible.
Singh recalls a Class 8 student who has been trying to get an APAAR ID for over a year. When she enrolled at age four, before she had an Aadhaar card, the school registered her as "Sabba". A year later, her Aadhaar card spelled her name "Saba".
The system allows teachers to change one letter but not to delete one. This seemingly trivial distinction has profound consequences. No one knows whether this girl will be allowed to enroll in ninth grade. Her entire educational future hangs on a double "b".
Even Shivendra Kumar Mishra, who works as a customer service point agent helping others fix their Aadhaar problems, couldn't solve his own daughter's.
"The operator registered it wrong – Shivendra became Sivendra. I didn't notice," he tells me. When Class 9 registration came around, the error had already propagated through UDISE+.
"Those details are not matching with Aadhaar. So now we don't know whether she can appear for Class 10 exams."
In Jharkhand, more than half of all school-age children are still waiting for their APAAR numbers.
A peek into the UIDSE+ portal shows the mess. At one private school with 550 students, only 145 are registered on the portal with a valid PEN — the prerequisite for getting an APAAR ID. The rest are stuck in various stages of mismatch limbo.
One Phone, Three Children: Do The Math
Just when families were grappling with name mismatches and phantom birthdays, the government added another obstacle. In the new academic year, a new rule emerged: one APAAR ID per phone number. When creating the ID, an OTP is sent to the registered number. That number cannot be reused for another student.
For most families, this is impossible arithmetic. Salauddin, a daily wage laborer, has three children in the same school and two phones – his and his brother's. Two children now have APAAR IDs. The third does not.
“It is an ID proof for education," Salauddin explains with surprising confidence, given the system's opacity. "Anytime you need your child to get admission in a school, you need APAAR." But when I ask whether he read the consent form before enrolling his children, he looks puzzled. "What consent form?"
The consent form is supposed to explain what data is collected and give parents the right to refuse. But most parents Decode spoke to did not know what APAAR is. Even those who recalled signing a document their children brought home did not read what it said — many received consent forms in English, a language they don't read or understand.
Digital-rights lawyer Apar Gupta, executive director of the Internet Freedom Foundation, has repeatedly questioned the legal basis for mass student data collection. "These forms offered no genuine choice," he says. Parents found themselves signing away extensive personal information with no explicit right to refuse. He calls it "coerced consent".
"The right to education is guaranteed to every child," he adds. "It cannot be held hostage to technical glitches or mismatched databases. A digital system cannot become a gatekeeper to rights."
Gupta and other digital rights activists argue that APAAR's approach to consent – especially its link to children's Aadhaar and opaque data-sharing with third parties – falls short of both international privacy norms and Supreme Court rulings that mandate strong procedural safeguards.
He points to one telling detail: the official APAAR website lists a "grievance officer" for complaints, then leaves the space next to the name blank. "That's how casual the process has been," he says.
Elsewhere on the site, the Ministry of Education attempts to dispel what it calls "common misconceptions." The most revealing reassurance insists that ID generation is simple. On the contrary, it keeps getting more complicated.
The one-phone-to-one-APAAR rule is just the latest barrier.
Devahuti Sarkar, program coordinator at LibTech India, an organisation that tracks how digitisation affects welfare access, brings out another challenge: "You need a recharged phone to get an OTP. People don't have that kind of money." She describes a woman whose Reliance Jio phone had a permanently embedded SIM card – a cost-saving measure for the telecom company – which her daughter accidentally dropped in water. Without the OTP, the woman cannot access her ICDS take-home rations.
During field research in Odisha, LibTech found an entire hamlet with no mobile phones. Yet the system requires phone-based authentication at multiple crucial steps.
“It Will Be Made Compulsory”
On 2 December 2024, the Ministry of Education responded to an RTI request with reassuring language: "No students can be forced to create an APAAR ID." It is "a voluntary process and no student will be disadvantaged for not having an APAAR ID."
The realities are different.
A teacher in Latehar, a remote district in Jharkhand, showed me a notice from the Education Project Council, mandating APAAR for students in Class IX to Class XII. The deadline for teachers to finish the enrolment has been set to mid November.
The state education board, Jharkhand Academic Council, requires schools to provide students’ APAAR ID when registering them for examinations. The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has issued similar mandates earlier.
Several teachers report receiving messages from block officers threatening to withhold salaries if enrollment is not complete.
In Latehar district, teachers are being pressured heavily from the block level," Sarkar confirms.
"You can't stop admissions of a student officially, but schools are doing it perhaps to ensure they don't get into trouble."
Mishra, who prefers to be called a "Bank Mitra" rather than a customer service point agent, recalls a Class 9 student denied admission to a new school for Class 10. The boy's previous school lacked a UDISE code, making it impossible to fix his details in the system. The new school cannot enroll him in APAAR without proper UDISE+ registration. So they refused admission entirely.
Among parents, there is weary recognition of how these things work. "Is it compulsory?" they ask each other. "It isn't now," someone answers, "but it will be made."
Salauddin draws connections to broader patterns. "They were not letting people vote in Bihar despite owning Aadhaar cards," he says, referring to the state elections where the Supreme Court directed the Election Commission to accept Aadhaar as proof of identity after allegations of voter deletion.
Vivek Gupta, another LibTech coordinator, predicts what comes next: "Before we know it, APAAR ID will be tied to mid-day meals, making it difficult for kids to get their only nutritious meal."
Economist Jean Drèze, who has long studied Jharkhand's experiments with digital welfare, has a name for this: the "Perpetual Aadhaar Alignment Problem" – the endless chase to make one document match another. “People spend months correcting records only to find they have created a fresh inconsistency,” he says.
He believes that Aadhaar should not be mandatory at all, at least not below the age of 14. “The Supreme Court orders on this are very clear: elementary education is a fundamental right and no child should be deprived of it for lack of Aadhaar. In reality, Aadhaar is as good as compulsory for school admission. Meanwhile, a small but significant minority of children in Jharkhand have great difficulty getting an Aadhaar number because they don't have an accredited birth certificate.”
Instead of abiding by Supreme Court orders, Drèze argues, the central government is creating further hurdles by insisting on APAAR and its consistency with Aadhaar.
Jharkhand: Where Digital Dreams Become Nightmares
There is bitter irony in Jharkhand becoming ground zero for APAAR's failures. This state has been here before.
In 2013, RS Sharma – the architect of Aadhaar and founding director-general of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) – became chief secretary of Jharkhand. The state became one of the earliest and most aggressive adopters of Aadhaar integration.
The political symbolism was powerful. The implementation was disastrous.
Children often simply fall through the cracks of bad data entry. Photo: Adrija Bose
Between 2016 and 2019, independent audits found that Jharkhand had some of the highest Aadhaar-linked exclusion rates in the country. A 2018 survey by LibTech India and the Right to Food Campaign estimated that between 10 and 15 percent of job-card holders in the state were unable to receive MGNREGA wages because of Aadhaar seeding errors, while about 20 percent of pensioners faced payment failures.
A 2017 study by economists Jean Drèze and Reetika Khera found that roughly 10% of ration-card beneficiaries were excluded from the Public Distribution System after biometric authentication failed.
Years later, the consequences persist. Plenty of Aadhaar cards exist in Jharkhand. But they're riddled with unfixable errors. Government money sits in "ghost" bank accounts – accounts people don't know exist or cannot access because of typos on their Aadhaar cards.
Mishra estimates 30-40% of people in every village he visits have mismatched Aadhaar data that doesn't align with ration cards, bank accounts, or birth certificates.
He knows a woman whose bank account lists her as "Munni Devi" while her Aadhaar says "Mouni Devi". "Her money from the government is in the bank, but she can't withdraw the amount."
In another case, an operator mistakenly entered someone's gender as female instead of male. The person never checked the card. "Now the bank is saying we need proof that this person is male," Mishra says.
The solution is to submit the birth certificate, which they don’t have and which sometimes takes years to process, with the confusing rules and bureaucratic system.
“No one has the solution – no solution at block level, district level," Mishra says, before catching himself about to launch into yet another example. He stops. There are too many.
With APAAR, Jharkhand is treading the same path as it once did with Aadhaar.
Fixing One Error Requires Ten More
To fix a mismatch, one needs documents. And that is where the system becomes truly Kafkaesque. Getting one document requires other documents. And those documents require money, time, and literacy that most rural families don't have.
One of the biggest hassles has been the absence of birth certificates. On school records, January 1 appears again and again as a date of birth. "This happens because the schools don't ask them for details and fill up the admission form with placeholders," a government school teacher explained.
Years pass. The placeholder date enters e-Vidya Vahini, the state government's platform. When the central government introduces UDISE+, all school records transfer automatically. The errors migrate with them. Only later, when families obtain Aadhaar cards with real birth dates, does the mismatch emerge.
"Teachers can't change the date of birth in the system. So the only option is to change the date of birth on the Aadhaar. For that, one needs a birth certificate. And that is the most difficult document to get in villages," the teacher says.
A digital birth certificate is now mandatory for making Aadhaar cards for children. "Different rules exist in different blocks to get this certificate, and they keep changing the rules," Sarkar says.
A block officer informs Decode that the Common Service Center, known as Pragya Kendra in Jharkhand, can issue birth certificates. But they often charge up to Rs 4,000 for a free service. "They can ask for any amount since there is no official price on it," he said. Even if someone has the money, the process can take years.
Name changes are equally difficult. They require a gazette notification, which requires an affidavit and newspaper publication, then a journey to the city's Aadhaar center with all documentation. "Very complicated and difficult for people," Sarkar says with characteristic understatement.
Then there's the training problem. Even where local Aadhaar centers function, operators lack sufficient training. "They make errors in data entry, and then documents don't match, leading to rejections at the local level," Sarkar explains.
Jharkhand has five Aadhaar Seva Kendras – the only reliable enrollment centers – and most are in cities, hours from rural villages.
Sarkar describes one of the most disturbing cases she's encountered: two siblings who underwent mandatory biometric updates at age five had their fingerprints accidentally swapped in the system.
Both Aadhaar cards are now deactivated. One child is in Class 9, the other in Class 10. "Neither of them can register for examinations. The Class 10 student won't be able to appear for boards," she says.
The exams are in four months.
The Invisible Children
One of the biggest victims of this digital maze will be migrant workers' children, predict teachers. When families migrate for work, children move with them. But the databases don't follow.
If a child moves to a different school, they're placed in a UDISE+ "drop box" — flagged as inactive or non-existent. Years can pass while new schools attempt re-registration, navigating district magistrate approvals and bureaucratic tedium.
"The additional burden of APAAR will make their lives even harder," says Barun Kumar, a government school teacher in Ratu.
Then there are the children who simply fall through the cracks of bad data entry.
Subodh, a data entry operator, explains that before 2023, the system was simpler. Then the government mandated that every student's details be entered into the central portal – 53 data fields per child.
"Teachers struggled with the workload, many gave up midway," Subodh says. "Now the students, despite being in schools, are not in the system."
The system also has rigid age bands for each class. Subodh shows records of a 12-year-old, which incorrectly states that she is in Class 4, instead of Class 7. Because her age exceeds the predetermined band for Class 4, the system rejects her entry. A big red cross appears next to her name.
"The teacher who made the entry had made a mistake years ago. No one corrected it then, and now it's too late. The child will not be able to get an APAAR ID," he explained.
Kundan Kumar, a private school teacher, points to three students who have attended his school since 2022 but show as "inactive" in UDISE+. "Some schools sent some kids to the inactive, instead of the transfer category. So we can't enroll these students into the UDISE+ portal. And that means no PEN is generated for these children."
No PEN, no APAAR. No APAAR, increasingly, means no education.
Drèze warns of another consequence. “When APAAR proves difficult to generate for a particular child, a teacher who is under pressure to meet the 100% target may be tempted to send that 'problem' child away. This is a chilling thought."
“Should I Teach Or Fill Forms?”
A few kilometres away, I meet Karuna Toppo, who teaches an entire school in three classrooms, classes from kindergarten through fifth grade.
She is the sole educator, register keeper, Aadhaar-checker, APAAR-liaison, and data entry clerk.
Teachers are overworked. Sometimes, one teacher runs an entire school, teaching and doing all the administrative work. Photo: Adrija Bose
She begins her day trying to mark attendance via the Vidya Vahini app (Jharkhand’s mandatory app for teachers) by 9 am, most days logging in at 8:30 am, hoping to beat the network failure. Sometimes fingerprints don’t register; sometimes the net is too weak; sometimes the app times out.
"Should I teach class or fill forms and do admin work?" Karuna asks. It's not really a question.
She sees children with blank APAAR entries, parents growing desperate, reports perpetually delayed. She also receives WhatsApp messages from officials threatening salary deductions if APAAR generation rates don't improve.
The CBSE recently acknowledged the chaos, issuing a circular that allows schools to mark entries as REFUSED (parental refusal) or NOGEN (not generated for technical reasons) when APAAR IDs aren't available for board examinations.
Drèze points to the inherent contradiction in the circular itself.
"It explains in passing that the process requires parents to sign a so-called consent form," he says. "But the same circular instructs the principals to ensure 100% saturation of APAAR IDs for all students.”
It is an impossible instruction: obtain consent while achieving total compliance.
The Mismatch Of Promise And Delivery
The Ministry of Education promoted APAAR as a neat policy: one lifetime academic identity, portable across schools and states, storing report cards and credentials in DigiLocker, eliminating bureaucratic friction. "One Nation, One Student ID" fit perfectly into the National Education Policy's vision of modernised, integrated schooling.
The gap between vision and reality has become a chasm. Sarkar puts it plainly: "The purpose was to remove inclusion errors, but the government's digitisation processes have created exclusion errors, repeatedly."
She pauses, then adds: "Education is a right. If people have to face harassment in trying to get their rights, that's a big question mark on their dignity."
For Tarannum Khatun, the harassment continues. Her pilgrimage to Ranchi will happen again in a few months, when someone tells her to try once more. For Saba, whose name carries one too many letters. For Mishra's daughter, whose father's name was misspelled. For the 12-year-old stuck in Class 4 in the computer's memory. For the siblings with swapped fingerprints.
The government calls it "One Nation, One Student ID." For thousands of children, it's becoming one typo and no school admission.
Decode reached out to the Ministry of Education, CBSE, and Jharkhand Academic Council with detailed questions about APAAR implementation challenges, the gap between voluntary policy and mandatory enforcement, and mechanisms for resolving technical mismatches. At the time of publication, none had responded.
