For Bengal, Ayushman enrolment will be easier than cracking SIR
Times of India | 12 August 2026
Kolkata: What’s in a surname? Well, for many in Bengal during Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls, it could have meant the difference between being on the voters’ list and off it.
The Ayushman Bharat health insurance card, however, may be easier to crack. The administration has issued detailed guidelines for resolving mismatches between Aadhaar details and other documents during verification so that genuine beneficiaries are not denied Ayushman Bharat benefits because of minor discrepancies in identity records.
The directive instructs officials to strictly follow National Health Authority (NHA) guidelines “in letter and spirit” while allowing for flexibility in handling discrepancies commonly encountered in Bengal. Officials have been told not to reject applications over minor variations in surnames that are widely accepted; so Mukherjee on one document and Mukhopadhyay on another (or Banerjee and Bandyopadhyay, Chatterjee and Chattopadhyay, Bhattacharjee and Bhattacharya, Basu and Bose, Dutta and Datta, Roy and Ray, Paul and Pal) or commonly used abbreviations (say, for Mohammad) will not lead to problems.
“The goal is to ensure that genuine beneficiaries are not excluded because of traditional or linguistic variations in surnames,” a senior Nabanna official said.
The move comes months after SIR exercise, when thousands of Mukherjees, Banerjees, Gangulys and Chatterjees were red-flagged for “logical discrepancies” because Election Commission’s software treated traditional surname variants as different surnames. Thousands of voters were summoned to hearings to explain these “discrepancies”.
The administration has also directed officials to overlook minor “clerical errors” in an Ayushman Bharat applicant’s name where the beneficiary’s identity has otherwise been established. “Special consideration will be given to married women whose fathers’ names may be absent from records or whose surnames may have changed after marriage. Minor spelling variations in their fathers’ names, too, will not lead to any harassment,” another official said.
These were among the most contentious issues during SIR exercise, with many women being summoned to hearings because of surname changes after marriage or minor errors in their fathers’ names or surnames.
“The Ayushman Bharat guidelines issued by the state health department also state that differences in PIN codes between Aadhaar and other documents may be accepted if both are in Bengal. Address mismatches, too, should not be treated as grounds for rejection as change of residence is common,” an official added.
Officials have also been told to match only the year of birth across multiple documents rather than insisting on exact date matches. Gender-related discrepancies, too, will not lead to delays or harassment if they are clearly established as “clerical errors”.