Aadhaar helps 18-year-old mentally-challenged man reunite with family after gap of 10 years

An 18-year-old man suffering from mental health issues, who had gone missing at the age of eight from Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh and started living in Nagpur, was reunited with his family with the help of his Aadhaar details. Before he went missing in 2011, his family members had got his Aadhaar registration done.

The man was handed over to his biological parents on June 30, said Samarth Damle, who looked after him all these years as a family member. Damle used to run an orphanage at Panchsheel Nagar in Nagpur, which was closed down in 2015.

“The boy was found at the railway station when he was around eight years old. He was brought to our orphanage by the police,” Damle said, adding that he is mentally-challenged and is unable to speak properly. He said, “We named him Aman as he could only utter ‘Amma Amma’. He stayed in the orphanage till 2015. But after the facility shut down, Aman had no one to look after him, so we brought him home and since then he had been living with us as a family member. I have one daughter and a son.” Aman was also admitted to a local school and he studied in Class X this year, Damle said. The school needed his Aadhaar card details. Damle tried to register his name for Aadhaar, but it used to get rejected due to biometric issues.

After that, he approached the UIDAI office in Nagpur’s Mankapur area, where the centre manager found that Aman’s Aadhaar registration had already been done and his real name was Mohammed Aamir, which ultimately helped them trace his family.