7 UID bogus centers shut down

In what comes as an addition to fraud incidents in the city, seven Unique Identification Centers were shut down by the civic corporation on Monday. The Thane Municipal Corporation (TMC) closed down these seven bogus UID centers where several citizens have already got their UID forms enrolled.

However, the process will be declared as void as these centers are not legal. The seven mentioned centers were operating without any permission from the authorities since the past few months. Two centers in Panchpakhadi, Lokmanya Nagar and Khopat each and one center in Vrindavan society were shut down by the municipal corporation. The TMC has made it clear that citizens who enrolled themselves in these centers will not get their UID cards and will have to enroll themselves all over again at an authorised centre in the city.
Informed sources from TMC maintained that Vakhrangee Software Ltd. was using a bank's name to provide UID cards to citizens and some Maharashtra Navnirman Sena activists were believed to be running the bogus centers. It is learnt that a corporator informed the civic body about the bogus centers following which the TMC took a stern action and Additional Commissioner of TMC, L R Gupta, summoned Rahul Devpal, the owner of the software agency. During interrogation, it was revealed that these centers were bogus.
Many citizens have already enrolled themselves for the scheme but will again have to redo the process. A woman requesting anonymity said, "My son went to the center at Vrindavan Society and waited there for around four hours to get himself enrolled. All those efforts have proved futile. The civic body had opened 40 such centers in the city this year and each center enrolls 50 person's UID forms each day. The government had allotted the work to authorised banks, government undertaking organisations and others. The central government started the UID scheme which is also known as Aadhar to provide citizens a 12-digit identification number under the Unique Identification Authority of India.