Patna: Aadhaar cards have come to the rescue of at least nine children who have been living at a care centre in Chhapra, around 70km from here, for around two-and-a-half years.

These children are either hearing or speaking impaired, or mentally challenged. Hence they have not been able to tell anything about their whereabouts after being brought to the home.

The children, from Bihar, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh and Haryana, were found by police from different places in Saran district where they had got lost.

Chairman of the children welfare committee of Saran, Sanjay Singh, told The Telegraph: "We were getting the Aadhaar registration of all the children of this home done as part of our record keeping exercise. It was found that the Aadhaar registration of nine children could not be done. We used to get a message that the registration of these children had already been done. We wrote to the state rural development department to dig out the details."

The rural development department is the nodal agency for Aadhaar registration in Bihar.

After getting the request, rural development minister Shravan Kumar directed the officials concerned to dig out the details quickly.

An official in the rural development department said the biometric details of the children were procured and matched with the stored data on the basis of which details emerged.

Welfare committee chairman Singh said: "All the parents have been contacted and the children would be handed over to them as soon as they can come."