The Uttarakhand government on Saturday said it will investigate how all the villagers in Gaindi Khata, 20 km from Haridwar, ended up with the same date of birth – January 1 – on their Aadhaar cards.

“Action will be taken against wrongdoers,” ANI quoted Manish Singh, the Sub Divisional Magistrate of Haridwar, as saying.

“We were told we will be getting a unique identification number. But what is unique about it? Even our birthdays are the same now,” Alafdin, one of the residents of Gaindi Khata, told The Times of India.

Deputy village panchayat chief Mohammad Imran told the daily that the agency that was given the task of preparing the Aadhaar cards was at fault. Now, the villagers are afraid that they will lose out on various government schemes that have made Aadhaar mandatory.

In May, the Unique Identification Authority of India said that it marked January 1 as birth dates for people who do not know when exactly they were born.