Every few months since 2017, Tarannum Khatun takes the same exhausting trip, a one-hour ride to Ranchi, another long queue at an Aadhaar centre, and the same hopeless paperwork dance. Her 13-year-old daughter, Sana, was born at home. A typing error during an Aadhaar enrolment years ago has since left her “blacklisted.” Without Aadhaar, Sana cannot get an APAAR ID, the new “Automated Permanent Academic Account Registry” that the government insists will unify student records across India, per a Boom online report.
Teachers warn Tarannum that without it, Sana won’t be registered in the national education database and may not be allowed to sit for board exams. “It’s been more than 45 days and I still haven’t got any message,” Tarannum told Boom, after her last futile visit to Ranchi.
Notably, across India, millions of students are trapped like Sana. APAAR, hailed as a breakthrough in India’s digital education infrastructure, is running into the same cracks that have long haunted Aadhaar.
When databases don’t speak the same language
In Jharkhand, generating an APAAR ID requires three systems to align perfectly: handwritten school registers, UDISE+ (the Unified District Information System for Education), and Aadhaar.
“The student’s name, date of birth and Aadhaar number must exactly match,” explains Gorakh Kumar Singh, a computer teacher in Ranchi, per the Boom. “I am the only one who knows how to operate computers.”
Singh recalls a Class 8 student whose APAAR application was rejected because her school record said ‘Sabba’ while her Aadhaar read ‘Saba.’ “The system allows us to change one letter but not delete one. So we can’t fix it,” he said.
Even Shivendra Kumar Mishra, a customer service agent, discovered that his own daughter’s Aadhaar had him listed as “Sivendra.” “Now we don’t know whether she can appear for Class 10 exams,” he told Boom.
Now, a new rule has made things worse: one APAAR ID per phone number. For families with several children, this is impossible.
While the Ministry of Education insists APAAR is optional, Jharkhand teachers say otherwise. Notices from block offices warn of salary cuts if APAAR enrolment isn’t complete. Schools are refusing admission without it. “You can’t stop a child’s admission officially, but schools are doing it anyway,” said Devahuti Sarkar of LibTech India.
“The right to education cannot be held hostage to technical glitches or mismatched databases. These forms offered no genuine choice,” Apar Gupta, executive director of the Internet Freedom Foundation, told Boom.
In Jharkhand, even fixing a minor error can take months. Birth certificates are missing. Teachers can’t edit birth dates. Local Aadhaar centres charge up to ₹4,000 for corrections. One error leads to ten new ones.
