CHENNAI: At least 20 citizens of Bangladesh were recently arrested by Tamil Nadu police. Interestingly, these illegal immigrants allegedly had not only acquired ration cards and driving licenses but had also managed to get authentic Aadhaar cards and, through Aadhaar, passports.
Experts point to two crucial loopholes in the Aadhaar system that leave it vulnerable to exploitation. First, the Aadhaar Act says that anyone who has resided in the country for 182 is eligible to get an Aadhaar card — proof of which is easy to attain. Second, contract employees at enrolment centres have proved notoriously easy to bribe. However, experts claim little has been done to plug these loopholes. Shockingly, the Bangladeshis were caught almost by chance after one of them reportedly slipped up and gave the game away at the Chennai airport.
Wrong accent at the airport
Nineteen-year-old Zia-ul-Haq had an Indian passport and a valid Chennai-Dubai flight ticket. However, it was his accent that reportedly gave him away to Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) personnel at the Chennai airport. Officials said the CISF personnel had noticed he was speaking broken Hindi with a “Bangladeshi accent”. The youth was taken aside and questioned separately. Police said that during interrogation, he claimed he had paid money to get a fake passport and Aadhar card from a gang holed up at Mettukuppam near Thoraipakkam.
“The CISF officer had worked at the border state of West Bengal and dealt with the illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. It was based on this that he was able to catch on to youth’s deception,” said a senior officer in the Central Crime Branch (CCB).Based on the information gathered from Zia-ul-Haq, police personnel raided the Mettukuppam house and arrested the Hossain brothers — Noor (24), Sahadat (21) and Mohammad Alamgir (23) — natives of Chittagong district in Bangladesh.
During interrogation, the brothers reportedly told the police that they crossed the border by lying on top of empty trucks plying from Bangladesh to West Bengal. Once they arrived in West Bengal, they reached out to a group in Odisha or Bihar that made them birth and school leaving certificates, police explained. “That group had stolen certificates from people. In some cases, people had actually sold their certificates for a very low price,” police said.
The group is alleged to have changed the names of the Bangladeshis to names that sounded more Indian and prepared the certificates. With the help of these certificates and by bribing officials, they got ration cards made. Once they got the ration card, some five years ago, they moved to Tamil Nadu to find work. They chose TN as the pay for menial work was higher, police officials said.
The Aadhaar passport
“Fearing they would be deported if caught, they decided to get Aadhaar cards. They stayed at a rented house owned by one M Raja Simhan and paid Rs 5,000 as monthly rent. They worked at a juice shop and a few restaurants nearby,” said an investigating officer. The Hossain brothers allegedly submitted telephone bills, bank passbooks and ration cards to get Aadhaar cards. Later, they allegedly used the Aadhaar cards to apply for passports through tatkal and got the passports in a few days. The police officers who visited them for verification got positive feedback from their neighbours and gave their approval.
Tip of the iceberg
Based on the confession of the Hossain brothers, the Tamil Nadu police arrested 19 more illegal immigrants from Bangladesh in Tirupur. All of them had Aadhaar cards. “It was a 26-year-old from Bihar named Ramshisah Verma, residing at Avinashi, who created fake Aadhaar cards for the Bangladeshi nationals,” investigating officer Inspector Chandra Mohan said.
According to Chandra Mohan, Verma had worked at an Aadhaar enrolment centre in Bihar before he quit his job and moved to TN. “While he was working in Bihar, he noticed a large number of people migrating to Tamil Nadu and hoping to earn more, he too moved. Eventually he earned more than expected. He had his own biometric system in his room and had enrolled people using the ID which he had when he worked in Bihar,” said a police officer.
Verma allegedly inserted the names of his customers into the Aadhaar database in the night, after the enrolment centres had closed. He is also alleged to have sold data to private companies and banks.
Usha Ramanathan, an prominent Aadhaar critic, said, “The Aadhaar Act says that a person should have stayed in the country for 182 days to enable the unique identification number. It is easy for someone to prove that they were not in the country with the help of passport. But how will you prove that you were in a specific place? This is one of many flaws the Aadhaar system has.”
Another flaw in the system, she said, was the enrollment centres where bribing the man employed on contract basis is easy. “The immigrants directly tell the Aadhaar enrollment officers that they are from Nepal or Bangladesh or Bhutan and they need Aadhaar ID. The enrollment officers charge a fee of `500 to `2000 and provide them with the unique identification number. This is because the enrollment has been outsourced to private companies,” she said.
A Tamil Nadu government official responsible for the enrolment centres agreed. “The enrolment centres fell into the hands of the government only three years ago. Till then it was completely under private agencies,” the official said. “All they need us to do is to scan two documents attached with the biometrics and send it to the UIDAI headquarters for approval. Only if we attach two scan documents along with the biometrics will we be able to submit for approval. Since there are lakhs of applications every day the people working at headquarters do not find time to verify all of them. It doesn’t matter what you scan, they send the Aadhaar card with the address we have typed in the form,” he added.
Express’ attempts to get a response from senior UIDAI officials were futile.
Cheap labour
Many business owners in Tamil Nadu provide illegal immigrants shelter as they are cheap labour. “House owners, who tie-up with local businessmen, provide them houses to stay as they believe they won’t create problems and they will get rent regularly from their employers. The forged documents are submitted with rental agreements to start a bank account,” said a police officer.