Aadhaar card not valid document to determine age: Supreme Court

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“We find that the Unique Identification Authority of India has stated that an Aadhaar Card, while can be used to establish identity, is not per se proof of date of birth,” a Supreme Court bench noted. File | Photo Credit: The Hindu

The Supreme Court on Thursday (October 24, 2024) set aside an order of the Punjab and Haryana High Court, which had accepted Aadhaar card for determining the age of a road accident victim to grant compensation.

A bench comprising Justices Sanjay Karol and Ujjal Bhuyan, therefore, said the age of the deceased person had to be determined from the date of birth mentioned in the school leaving certificate under Section 94 of the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015.

“We find that the Unique Identification Authority of India, by way of its circular number 8 of 2023, has stated, in reference to an office memorandum issued by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology dated December 20, 2018, that an Aadhaar Card, while can be used to establish identity, is not per se proof of date of birth,” noted the bench.

When it came to determining the age, the top court accepted the contention of the claimant-appellants before it and upheld the judgment of the Motor Accident Claims Tribunal (MACT), which calculated the deceased’s age on the basis of his school leaving certificate.

The top court was hearing an appeal filed by relatives of a man who died in a road accident in 2015.

MACT, Rohtak awarded a compensation of ₹19.35 lakh which was reduced to ₹9.22 lakh by the High Court after noting the MACT had wrongly applied the age multiplier while determining the compensation.

The High Court had relied on the deceased person’s Aadhaar card to calculate his age as 47.

The family contended that the High Court erred in determining the deceased person’s age on the basis of the Aadhaar card as his age, if calculated as per his school leave certificate, was 45 at the time of death.

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