The four young schoolchildren sat, somewhat anxiously, in the place they had been told to go to by their headmaster. Their scholarships were at stake – and not because of their performance or lack of it. The headmaster had sent the kids there to help them, not to punish them. And this was not a classroom in their school. A little drama was entering Act II in Amadagur, one of the poorest mandals in Andhra Pradesh’s Anantapur district.
On January 16, PARI published a story about J. Indu , a 10-year-old Dalit girl, and four other students in the fifth standard of the government primary school at Amadagur. All five were likely to miss getting their scholarships this year because their names are wrongly spelt on their Aadhaar cards. Indu’s name appeared as ‘Hindu’ on her card and remained that way even on a new ‘corrected’ version that her family applied for.
This was preventing Indu’s school from opening a bank account on her behalf – an Aadhaar card with her correct and matching name is mandatory for that purpose. The four other students, all boys (three of them Dalit, one a Muslim), faced the same predicament. Students of scheduled caste, scheduled tribe and backward class backgrounds in Andhra Pradesh are entitled to a government scholarship of Rs. 1,200 per annum from the fifth standard onwards.
A day after the story appeared on PARI, an official from the regional office of the UIDAI (Unique Identification Authority of India) in Hyderabad called K. Nagendra,
— source ruralindiaonline.org | Rahul M. | Jan. 30, 2018