Digital India to rely on Aadhaar

The story so far is nothing short of a thriller. We had a change of government and the new government has broadened the scope of the aadhaar project.

Let me list out a few of the initiatives towards a greater reliance on aadhaar.

1) The big news is that the election commission has voted in favour of linking aadhaar with electoral rolls. I experienced it in the site www.nvsp.in. Possibly electronic voting may be introduced for the armed forces.

2) The other news is that passport office will speed up issuing passport for aadhaar card holders. Those with aadhaar cards are expected to get passport within 10 days and the time consuming police verification step is going to be undertaken after issuance of passport. Needless to mention if the PCC(Physical Police Verification-Police Clear Certificate) is not obtained then a passport may be revoked.

3) The budget is a very eagerly awaited exercise this month as it may spell out a new way of disbursing fertilizer subsidies. Kisan Credit Card, Soil Health Card, Aadhaar and other documents like the jan dhan account may be relied on to directly transfer fertilizer subsidy.

4) Cellular Operators Association of India(COAI) is piloting a method of issuing sim cards by instant aadhaar verification. The earlier method of filling up the Customer Acquisition Form(CAF) will be done away with.

5) UIDAI has started a new method of retrieving lost aadhaar cards. In this the biometric details of the person is taken and then a match is made in the database. Out of ten nearest matches demographic data of the person is entered and successively narrowed down to a perfect match. No information from the database is disclosed until the aadhaar number of the person is found.

6) Central government is scaling up the Aadhaar enabled Biometric Attendance System(AEBAS). March 1st is the deadline for all employees to get into the system.

7) Employees Provident Fund Organization(EPFO) has created a Universal Account Number(UAN) majorly relying on the aadhaar number. This UAN will not change even if the employee changes his job/employer. Namo government has decided to give back the 27,000 crore rupees accumulated in the inactive accounts of the PF offices back to its true holders. Number of claims for PF has increased in recent days and the PF offices across the country are currently overloaded with work/claims processing.

8) NPCI(National Payments Corporation of India) has piloted a new unified interface for payments linked with aadhaar number. This may use the details like the email id, mobile number and aadhaar number along with bank account number to wire money from one person to another.

9) Digitallocker.gov.in

This is a digital locker that can be opened using the aadhaar number/mobile phone combo. We will soon have 1GB of storage space per user to store important documents like certificates etc.

These are some major initiatives. Other pesky little uses the aadhaar is being put into are yet to emerge.
My earlier posts on aadhaar.... Poor Economics .... Giant Tsunami of aadhaar apps ..... Aadhaar Roundup-4