Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Aadhaar query on homeless -R Balaji

-The Telegraph

New Delhi: The Supreme Court has stumped the Centre by wondering how it intends to issue Aadhaar cards to innumerable homeless persons in the country in the absence of a residential identity.

The court also wondered how the homeless could be given any national identity at all when they do not have any individual proof of residence.

"A person who is homeless, how will you give an Aadhaar card?" a bench of Justices Madan B. Lokur and Deepak Gupta asked additional solicitor-general Tushar Mehta during a hearing on a petition on night shelters for the homeless, particularly during the winter.

Aadhaar was not mentioned in the PIL filed a decade ago by a social activist, E.R. Kumar, seeking night shelters for the destitute. Taken by surprise, Mehta could not come up with an immediate answer.

"A person who is homeless, how will he have an Aadhaar card? So far as the Union of the India (is concerned), these homeless persons do not exist?" Justice Lokur asked the law officer.

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