The Ministry of Human Resource Development has sought the Aadhaar numbers and details of caste, religion and phone numbers from 60% of more than 15 lakh university and college teachers of the country, The Indian Express reported on Thursday. The remaining teachers will be covered under the project within a month.

The move is aimed at removing “ghost” teachers from the ministry’s database. “We believe there are a lot of ghost lecturers. These are teachers who show up in multiple institutes, the ones not run by the government. Individual details such as Aadhaar numbers will help us identify such duplication,” the English daily quoted R Subrahmanyan, Additional Secretary of the HRD Ministry, as saying.

The ministry has been profiling teachers as part of the annual All India Survey on Higher Education but, until last year, the data would be provided by each institute. For the survey this year, a new Teacher Information Format has been introduced to create the teachers’ portal ‘Gurujan’.

Subrahmanyan allayed fears that collecting the Aadhaar numbers of teachers would leave them vulnerable to a security threat. “Initially, we may not make gurujan.gov.in open to public. We will not make any personal information public. The data will be absolutely safe,” he told The Indian Express.