Pehchan

By 2 June 2026, the Labour Department had registered 12,545 service providers in Ganderbal for an Amarnath Yatra that went on to serve more than 4.8 lakh pilgrims. Ponywallas, porters, drivers, guides, and camp staff work across a wide mountain corridor. Before Pehchan, telling a registered provider from someone who simply turned up meant trusting a paper list held somewhere else — no help to an officer at Zero Point or a family hiring a pony at Baltal.

In the field, every registered provider carries a unique QR identity issued through Pehchan. An officer at a checkpoint, or a visitor before hiring, scans it and sees who the person is and whether they are cleared to work there. Registration, issuance, verification, and status changes all resolve to one record, so a decision at Baltal is based on the same source of truth as a review in the control room.

Pehchan is not a printable badge database. We built identity as an operational service: fast enough for a queue, simple enough for repeated checkpoint use, and accountable enough for a sensitive corridor. The QR code exposes no useful identity by itself; authorised verification resolves the current record. Sovereign or on-prem deployment keeps institutional identity data under agency control, while an audit trail records enrolment, issuance, scans, and status changes.

Pehchan made a registration context of 12,545 service providers usable where trust is actually decided: at the point of contact. Police teams gained one corridor-wide verification workflow, legitimate providers gained a recognisable identity, and pilgrims gained a direct way to check the people serving them. Identity moved from a distant list into the field operation.