Chennai: After a day of confusion and embarrassment, Thangavel, a brick kiln worker from Chinnapoolampatti near Madurai, finally received relief when officials replaced the photo on his ration card, which had wrongly shown a beer bottle, with that of his wife.

The incident came to notice when Thangavel downloaded his ration card from a citizen service centre to submit it to the Construction Workers Welfare Board. To his shock, instead of his wife Jeyapriya’s photo, the card displayed an image of a beer bottle.

The unusual error went viral and caught the attention of authorities. On Thursday, civil supplies officials visited Thangavel’s home and handed over a corrected version of the card with the proper photo.

Officials clarified that the mistake was not caused by staff, but was likely due to an earlier feature that allowed cardholders to update their own photos online. In this case, it is suspected that someone in the household with less technical knowledge might have uploaded the wrong image by mistake.

They also added that, due to similar incidents in the past, including people uploading photos of film actors, the self-upload feature was later removed.