The Ahmedabad crime branch has received a Special Commendation Award from the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) for developing consent-based offline Aadhaar verification systems used by hotels and employers across Gujarat.
The award was presented at a UIDAI-Aadhaar conclave held recently in Kolkata, West Bengal. Joint commissioner of police, crime branch, Sharad Singhal, received the recognition on behalf of the department.
UIDAI recognised the crime branch as the first law enforcement agency to function as an offline verification seeking entity, or OVSE, for consent-based Aadhaar verification. The model uses two portals developed by the crime branch: Pathik, or the Program for Analysis of Traveller and Hotel Informatics, and Pratiraksha.
Pathik is used for verifying hotel guests, while Pratiraksha is intended for labour and employee verification. According to the information reported by the Times of India, UIDAI recognised the platforms for combining technology-driven verification with consent and privacy safeguards.
Pathik was launched in 2017 and has since expanded from an Ahmedabad initiative into a statewide system. More than 9,000 hotels across Gujarat are currently onboarded to the platform, giving the police access to a structured verification mechanism across a large and mobile segment of the urban population.
The crime branch said the system has also produced operational results in the field. Pathik has assisted in tracing more than 50 missing persons and identifying illegal immigrants, according to the report. The supplied information does not provide further details about the cases, the verification process used in each instance or the safeguards governing access to the data.
The award places the initiative within a wider shift towards digital systems for policing, accommodation records and workforce verification. Its urban significance lies not only in the technology but also in how hotels, employers and law-enforcement agencies exchange identity information. The use of consent-based offline verification is intended to distinguish the process from unrestricted or informal identity checks.
The crime branch’s next operational milestone is the continued use and expansion of Pathik and Pratiraksha across the state, with the two platforms already serving hotels and labour or employee verification requirements.