Infants Sindhu, Sakshi, Dipa, Deepika enrolled under Aadhaar an hour after birth

The Steel City created a record of sorts when four newborn babies were enrolled under the Aadhaar scheme within an hour of their births here on Monday at the government-run Mahatma Gandhi Medical College Hospital (MGMCH).

Three of these four girls, born on National Sports Day, were named after India’s Rio Olympics successes — PV Sindhu, Sakshi Malik and Dipa Karmakar. The fourth girl was named Deepika — after Jharkhand’s ace archer, Deepika Kumari.

The national record for the fastest Aadhar enrolment, however, appears to still stand with Rakhi who was enrolled within 22 minutes of her birth in Jhabua district’s Thandla development block in Madhya Pradesh on May 1 this year.

The initiative was taken by Sanjay Kumar Pandey, deputy collector at the chief minister’s camp office here. He took the Aadhaar enrolment team and equipment to MGMCH and got Dr Vijay Shankar Das and the gynecology department involved in enrolling the newborns.

On March 12, state IT secretary Sunil Kumar Barnwal had announced plans to use the services of 800 anganwadi workers who would use tablets to register and generate Aadhaar numbers online for newborns at the village level.

Sakshi was born at 2.30pm and she was enrolled by 3.30pm while it took about 90 minutes for the other three to be enrolled. “I requested the parents to name their daughters after our Olympic stars and they readily agreed. This is perhaps the first instance in Jharkhand of newborns getting Aadhar-enrolled on their hospital beds,” Pandey told HT.

“The idea is to promote the national mission of ‘Beti Padhao, Beti Bachao’ and our campaign ‘Meri Beti, Meri Pehchan’ at the local level,” said Pandey.