Tamil Nadu’s pregnancy registration system exposes Aadhaar tampering to hide child marriages in Krishnagiri

Teenage mothers using tampered Aadhaar cards exposed by PICME system, leading to legal action against child marriages.

Six teenage mothers using tampered Aadhaar cards to show a higher age were discovered, thanks to the State government’s Pregnancy and Infant Cohort Monitoring and Evaluation (PICME) system in Denkanikottai.

On Wednesday, a 17-year-old girl was intercepted by Collector C. Dinesh Kumar at the Comprehensive Emergency Obstetric and Newborn Care (CEmONC) centre at the government hospital. He felt she looked younger, though she insisted she was 18. “She didn’t look 18. When I checked her ID, I noticed that she was 17 in March, when she got married, and was now two-months pregnant. An entry was made and a case under the Child Marriage Act and the POCSO Act will be registered,” he said.

The Collector’s visit followed the detection of six persons as underage mothers though their Aadhaar cards showed a different date of birth.

The PICME portal registers and tracks pregnancies to prevent infant and maternal deaths, and to bring all births into the institutional delivery system. PICME registration is mandatory to get a birth certificate.

According to Deputy Director of Health Services G. Ramesh Kumar, there had been six cases of underage mothers from Kelamangalam block. Two of them were carrying Aadhaar cards with dates of birth that did not match the ones shown on their Aadhaar ID on the UIDAI portal.

Recently, a 29-year-old man produced a tampered Aadhaar card for his wife, showing her age as 19, while the seeded Aadhaar identification mentioned her age as 14. Three Internet centres had abetted the forgery.

The Health Department had since alerted the Tahsildar and the Collector. “Tampering was possible in the earlier system, where the PICME portal was manually fed using the ID produced by the mother. But on PICME 3.0, which is linked to the UIDAI portal, tampering is impossible,” Dr. Ramesh said. Once the Aadhaar number is keyed in, it will reveal all the details. “An OTP is sent to the phone number seeded to the Aadhaar number, without which we cannot proceed into the PICME portal,” said Sacharita, Block Medical Officer, Thally.