6 crores Aadhaar of deceased still active all over India including 34 lakhs in Bengal

An eerie reality unearthed in India's sprawling Aadhaar ecosystem, where a staggering 6 crore cards belonging to deceased individuals remain chillingly active opening floodgates to potential frauds from bogus accounts to pilfered pensions in a system meant to be the bedrock of digital identity. The revelation, spotlighted by UIDAI CEO Bhuvanesh Kumar, stems from a meticulous matching exercise with death records from the Registrar General of India (RGI), which has flagged 1.55 crore plus 38 lakh recent deaths since 2016—yet only 1.17 crore cards have been deactivated so far, with projections aiming for 2 crore by December amid an estimated 8 crore total fatalities in that span, where annual mortality has climbed from 56 lakh to 85 lakh.

In West Bengal alone, a shocking 34 lakhs Aadhaar holders have passed away without their IDs being retired, underscoring a casual approach to death registrations that leaves civil data patchy across just 25 states, turning what should be a seamless safeguard into a spectral loophole ripe for exploitation.UIDAI's proactive push includes a four-month-old online death notification portal, a digital lifeline for families to flag and deactivate loved ones' cards—yet uptake has been heartbreakingly low, with merely 3,000 reports filed and just 500 verified, highlighting a disconnect between policy and practice that leaves millions of phantom profiles lingering.

Compounding the chaos, 48 lakh records couldn't be matched, often due to 4-5% mismatches from regional language quirks in names, while bizarrely, 80 cases surfaced of "deceased" individuals turning up alive, now under probe. The database's quirks extend to longevity anomalies: 8.3 lakh holders listed over 100 years old, with Maharashtra topping at 74,000, Uttar Pradesh at 67,000, Andhra Pradesh at 64,000, and Telangana at 62,000—states verifying only a fraction, confirming 629 alive, 783 dead, and 1,674 untraced.

This spectral surge not only erodes trust in Aadhaar's ironclad uniqueness but amplifies calls for robust reforms—mandatory family verifications, AI-driven death cross-checks, and nationwide registration drives—to exorcise these digital ghosts before they drain the living. For a billion-plus populace tethered to this 12-digit lifeline, the message is stark: in the quest for inclusion, exclusion of the excluded mustn't become eternal.