The Supreme Court on Thursday observed that an Aadhaar Card cannot be used for determining the age, setting aside an order of the Punjab and Haryana High Court that accepted Aadhaar Card to determine the age of a road accident victim.
“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.
A bench led by Justices Sanjay Karol and Ujjal Bhuyan stated that the deceased’s age should be established using the date of birth recorded in the school leaving certificate, as outlined in Section 94 of the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015.
In determining the age, the Supreme Court agreed with the arguments presented by the claimant-appellants and upheld the Motor Accident Claims Tribunal (MACT) ruling, which assessed the deceased’s age based on his school leaving certificate.
The top court was hearing an appeal filed by kin of a man who died in a road accident in 2015.
The MACT in Rohtak initially awarded a compensation of Rs 19.35 lakh, but the high court reduced it to Rs 9.22 lakh, noting that the MACT had incorrectly applied the age multiplier in its compensation calculation.
The high court had relied on the deceased’s Aadhaar card to calculate his age as 47 years.
The family claimed that the high court was wrong to use the Aadhaar card for determining the deceased’s age, insisting that his age should have been considered as 45 years at the time of death according to his school leaving certificate.
(With inputs from agency)
