By Vidyut

Aadhaar services appear to be down for several days in Andhra Pradesh. Mee Seva centres appear to be suspended without explanation and people approaching the centres are being informed that the servers are down, according to Hans India.

The New Indian Express has reported the outage as “technical glitches” but describes the chaos that appears to have little to do with technical problems. People needing corrections in their Aadhaar card to avail essential services are met with frustrations as most enrolment centres are not working in the state. The New Indian Express says people are being told that they would be down for another 10 days due to upgradation – however, there is no notice from the UIDAI to this effect.

Only Karvy centres, and some centres in banks and post offices appear to be working even though the UIDAI lists 696 permanent enrolment centres and banks. Mee Seva centres that were permitted by the state to do enrolments and corrections appear to be suspended or at least not offering services for the last several months, presumably due to agents not updating correct details.

Only one out of seven enrolment centres is working in Vijayawada and District Collector B Lakshmi Kantham says they have written to National Informatics Centre (NIC) to repair at least two units. The one functioning Karvy centre sees people queuing up from dawn and can process only 100-150 enrolment/updation a day.

“Almost 80% of the applications are for correction of data while only 20% come for enrolments. Though there are many centres in the city, many of them are not functioning now. Due to shortage of staff, we could process only 100-150 applications a day,” a senior official with the Karvy enrolment centre told Express.

There isn’t a single working enrolment centre in Tirupati.

There appears to be chaos in the Aadhaar ecosystem, even as the Union government has issued directives to the states to recruit village panchayats to enrol people without address documents and Andhra Pradesh Grameena Vikas Bank is announcing the setting up of 26 enrolment centers in their branches in Andhra Pradesh (and another 50 in Telangana)

A version of the original published at Aadhaar FAIL