Punjab and Haryana High Court directs to examine whether hotels verify guest IDs
A photocopy at the front desk proves nothing. That unverified gap is what fraudsters, fugitives, and worse walk through, and it is exactly what DigiGo closes by checking identity against the government source.
Walk into almost any hotel in India and the ritual is the same. The desk asks for an ID, takes a photocopy, and files it away. Everyone treats this as the verification step. It is not. A photocopy proves only that a piece of plastic was held up at the counter. It proves nothing about whether the card is real, whether the name on it is real, or whether the person standing there is the person on the card.
That distinction is not academic. It is the gap that real crimes walk through.
What the gap actually enables
The most serious version of this is the one courts are now naming directly. On 20 May 2026, the Punjab and Haryana High Court directed the Haryana government to examine whether hotels and guest houses are properly verifying guest identity documents and maintaining working CCTV, observing that these safeguards are essential to prevent premises being misused for offences against women and children. When a hotel cannot establish who its guests are, its rooms become a convenient place to commit crimes that depend on anonymity.
It is also the oldest trick in hotel fraud. Over the years Indian police have arrested men who checked into five star properties posing as officials or as guests of bureaucrats, ran up large bills, and walked out. In one widely reported case a man impersonated a UAE royal functionary with a fake business card and resident card, stayed for months at a luxury hotel in Delhi, and fled leaving more than Rs 23 lakh unpaid. The common thread in these cases is never sophistication. It is that nobody checked the documents against anything.
And it is the reason police treat hotel registers as unreliable in serious investigations. There are long-documented cases of murder suspects and other wanted persons staying overnight under fake names and addresses, untraceable afterward precisely because the address in the register was invented. A register full of unverified entries is not a record. It is a list of claims.
A traveller on a public forum put the whole problem in one line years ago, noting that since there is no real validation of IDs at hotels, the entire exercise is close to useless. That has been true for a long time. It does not have to stay true.
Why this kept happening
For most of this period, hotels had no practical alternative. Verifying an Aadhaar number, a passport, or a government ID against the issuing source was not something a front desk could do. So the industry settled for the photocopy: enough to satisfy the form of the requirement, nowhere near enough to satisfy its purpose.
The infrastructure to close this gap now exists. Aadhaar, DigiLocker, and India's wider digital identity stack allow a person's identity to be confirmed against the government source itself, cryptographically, in seconds. A fake card cannot pass that check, because the check does not look at the card. It looks at the record behind it.
What DigiGo is for
DigiGo connects a hotel's check-in to that infrastructure. A guest verifies through Aadhaar or DigiLocker, or through passport verification if they are a foreign national, and what the hotel receives is a confirmed identity rather than a photocopy of an unconfirmed one. We are a UIDAI authorised OVSE and a DigiLocker partner, which is what makes verification against the source possible rather than just claimed.
This is the difference between collecting an ID and knowing who is in the building. The first is a filing habit. The second is the thing the law has always actually wanted, and the thing that keeps a fraudster, a fugitive, or someone who means harm from treating a hotel room as a blind spot.
Hotels were never the problem. The missing verification layer was. That is the layer DigiGo exists to provide.
