Bitti Mohanty case: How fake IDs can be had for a price

When you want to do the simplest thing like open a bank account or buy a mobile SIM card, you are certain to be sent on a royal runaround of bureaucratic documentation nightmare, with officials citing Know Your Customer (KYC) specifications drawn up by the Reserve Bank of India or some other regulatory agency. These KYC requirements, as Firstpost had noted , presumably stand for ‘Kick Your Customer’: they are fairly mindless, and intended to trouble the honest customer, who will run from pillar to post to satisfy the norms. But as the Bitti Mohanty case shows, fraudsters simply fake the documents - including passports, voter ID and university certificates - to get around the law - and even secure employment in the same nationalised banks that enforce rigorous KYC procedures… Precisely how the runaway Bitti, who jumped parole after being convicted in a rape case in far-off Alwar, found his way to Kerala and gave himself a fake identity as ‘Raghav Ranjan’, with official documents to back him up, isn’t yet known. But it’s a fair bet that the influence that his status as an Odisha top cop’s son must have counted for a lot, both in securing the fake documents and in keeping him off the radar while a manhunt was under way. [caption id=“attachment_654294” align=“alignright” width=“380”] Bitti Mohanty reinvented his life with fake IDs. PTI[/caption] But the Bitti Mohanty case also lays bare the hollowness of the entire document verification process when everything from passports to voter IDs can be faked. These procedures have over time become institutionalised, with the political cover being provided for even the fake registering of illegal immigrants. Indicatively, immigrants from Bangladesh have been known to secure everything from voter IDs to ration cards to legitimise their stay in India. That the authorities at the nationalised bank did not carry out the due process of verifying the fake education degrees that Bittoo submitted reflects the lackadaisical attitude that characterises such transactions. More often than not, these due processes swing between a finicky abidance by the rule of law - which gives absolutely no discretion to the authorities concerned, thereby harassing genuine parties  - and a blase attitude that suggests these are being observed merely for form’s sake. This attitude goes beyond just paperwork procedures: even the security measures at hotels in India’s cities, introduced following the November 2008 attacks in Mumbai, are being conducted in so perfunctory a manner as to render them wholly meaningless. Indicatively, at hotel gates, security guards may a great show of scanning the undercarriage of cars - presumably for bombs - but don’t even peep inside the passenger cabins, which renders it the most logical place for terrorists to pack them. In the Bitti Mohanty case, it is tempting to conclude that the Aadhar card project, being unrolled at enormous expense, will  help nab criminals on the run and keep them from covering their tracks in the way that Bitti did. After all, since the cards use biometric data and assign a unique number to every citizen of India, virtually anyone can be traced, particularlathy if they veer from the straight and narrow path.  But the evidence on that front isn’t persuasive. Barely before the rollout has been completed, reports of fake Aadhar cards have surfaced. In other cases, the details in the Aadhar cards are so garbled as to render them completely useless: a 61-year-old man, for instance, secured a card bearing the photograph of a teenager ( report here ); other such goof-ups abound ( more here ). In other instances, there have been reports of Aadhar cards found dumped in garbage bins, or of their not being delivered to the correct persons because of errors in the address while registering citizens ( more on that here ). In any case, for all the project’s claims to having covered a fair bit of the population, people have trouble registering even to this day - and in India’s biggest cities. As columnist Tavleen Singh observed ( here ), citing her own experience of trying to register for a card, “it could take another two decades to register a billion Indians and, by then, people will have stopped wondering what the purpose of the scheme was in the first place.” If this is the state of India’s most ambitious, prestigious project, which is being billed as the last line of defence in assigning a unique ID to India’s 1.2 billion people, it doesn’t inspire any hope that even this will be able to change anything on the ground. Or that crooks like Bitti Mohanty will be unable to escape the long arm of the law.