Nashik: It was a tweet by college student Nilay Kulkarni that jolted district authorities out of their slumber and forced them to take action against the shoddy manner in which acknowledgment print-outs of several Aadhaar applicants were stocked.Hours after Kulkarni’s tweet at 12.43 pm on Saturday, authorities swung into action. By Sunday afternoon, a show-cause notice had been slapped on the contractor entrusted the task of safe custody of these papers for alleged ‘dereliction of duties.’During his visit to Nashik Municipal Corporation-managed Yashwantrao Chavan Planetarium on Saturday for a science exhibition, the 18-year-old student stumbled on print-outs at the Aadhaar enrolment centre functioning at the premises of the planetarium. There is no door at this centre, so trespassing is easy.“There were about 1,000 such print-outs having personal information of the applicants like name, sex, date of birth, mobile number and email address,” Kulkarni told TOI.He uploaded this information on Twitter with a photograph, saying, “Aadhar print-outs simply lying around at Planetarium. You don’t even need to hack databases, simply take home the papers and scan for a huge mail address list to be sold.” The 28-year-old Frenchman who follows Aadhaar closely and operates a Twitter handle under the name ‘Elliot Alderson’, with over 50,000 followers, was among over 100 people to retweeted this.On Twitter, people expressed shock at the easy access to private information. Some wondered how this information could be abused.“My only concern was to ensure the papers were secured before going into the hands of miscreants,” Kulkarni said, thanking authorities for acting promptly to set things right.Deputy collector Shashikant Mangrule told TOI that it was not true that there were thousands of print-outs. “There were about 100 odd print-outs of enrolment identification (EID) containing name and only such information needed for update on Aadhaar. We have decided to slap the contractor assigned to run that centre on Monday with a show-cause notice. These should have been in safe custody,” the deputy collector said.Mangrule said Aadhaar processing kits are being kept in government premises, in accordance with the rules. The planetarium is guarded by security personnel of the civic body. He admitted that the manner in which EIDs were accessed by common people only highlights the fact that the contractor had failed to take adequate measures to protect these.Some district officials remarked on the alleged failure of security staff for being unable to ensure that there were no trespassers in the area.“Since Aadhaar processing is now carried out only online, no documents are expected to be retained by the contractor. No printouts were also expected. This norm was violated, and so a show-cause notice was served,” Mangrule said.

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