The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has asked schools across the country to ensure that children aged between 5 and 15 years complete their mandatory Aadhaar biometric updates without delay.UIDAI CEO Bhuvnesh Kumar has written to chief secretaries of states and Union territories, urging them to conduct special camps in schools to clear the backlog, an official release said on Wednesday, PTI reported.“UIDAI has joined hands with the Department of School Education and Literacy, to provide the Mandatory Biometric Update (MBU) status pertaining to Aadhaar of school children on the Unified District Information System for Education Plus (UDISE+) application — a move that will facilitate MBU in Aadhaar for crores of students,” the release said.The authority emphasised that biometrics must be updated twice — once when a child turns five, and again at 15 years — to maintain accuracy and reliability of data. Mandatory biometric updates are pending in nearly 17 crore Aadhaar numbers, UIDAI said.Failure to update biometrics could lead to authentication problems for government benefits and create hurdles for students appearing in competitive and university entrance exams such as NEET, JEE and CUET, it added.Kumar also told chief secretaries that a camp-based approach through schools would be the most effective way to complete the updates. “The main question was how the schools would know which students had not done the biometric updates,” he wrote, adding that UIDAI’s technology team and the Department of School Education and Literacy have implemented a solution through UDISE+.“Now all the schools can have the visibility of the pending MBUs,” Kumar said.