UIDAI achieves 111 crore mark on Aadhaar Generation

NEW DELHI: India's Electronics & IT and Law & Justice Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said that with 68th Republic Day, Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has achieved another landmark by generating 111 crore Aadhaar in a population of 125 crore plus.

The World’s largest and unique biometrics based identification programme with a real time online authentication infrastructure – the Aadhaarhas been recognized in the recent UN Report on World Social Situation, 2016 as a developmental tool with “tremendous potential to foster inclusion by giving all people, including the poorest and most marginalized, an official identity” and a wonderful “critical step in enabling fairer access of the people to government benefits and services”, thereby enhancing social and economic distributive justice leaving no one behind.

Aadhaar generation has crossed the 111+ crore mark. It’s a great achievement towards inclusion of everyone into national development fabric. It has come a long way in less than six and a half years of its journey from being a unique identification programme to transform itself into a critical development tool of public–centric good governance and targeted delivery of services/benefits/subsidies; Such a transformation became possible, because of the unique initiative of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, to use Aadhaar, for the financial and social inclusion.

Aadhaar enrolment ecosystem with 135 registrars and 612 enrolment agencies working at 47,192 enrolment stations has been enrolling and updating7-8 lakhs requests per day. Aadhaar generation as on 31stMay 2014 was 63.22 crore with a per dayenrolment/update trend of about 3-4 lakh which remained around 5-6 lakh per day till October 2016.

However, since demonetization the Aadhaar enrolment and update requests are in the range of 7-8 lakhs per day. With over 47.8 crore Aadhaars generated since June 2014, Aadhaar now stands at 111+ crore. UIDAI has 28,332 Permanent Enrolment Centres where people may go for enrolment, updation and other Aadhaar related services. UIDAI has a capacity of generating and dispatching over 15 lakh Aadhaars every day.

Aadhaar which began in its first phase as a unique identification programme with an authentication infrastructure grew into its second phase as the tool of public sector delivery reforms by becoming the permanent financial address of the Aadhaarholder;and as a tool for de-duplication, e-KYC anddirect benefit transfer in its third phase, it started contributing to the management of the fiscal budget by generating saving to the Government exchequer to the tune of 36,144 crore in a few welfare schemesonly in just two years”.

Now in its fourth phase, with demonetisation and Digital India drive towards less-cash economy, Aadhaar is all set to be the game changer with AadhaarPay – a non-traditional digital payment system without a need of card, pin, password or mobile with the consumer”, said Prasad.

He further added that Aadhaar has empowered people by increasing convenience and making their life hassle-free towards a presenceless, paperless and cashless environment.

Dispelling apprehensions on privacy and data security, Prasad said, “The Government is vigilant towards privacy protection and database security which is our paramount concern. We have Aadhaar Act 2016 which has strict provisions for protection of data and privacy.”

As on date, Aadhaar’s total saturation percentageis 91.7% (as per Census 2011) while over 99% adult population above the age of 18 have been assigned Aadhaar numbers. Twenty two States/UTs have more than 90% saturation.

As of now, more than 47 crore bank accounts have been seeded with Aadhaar number out of which 38.5 crore are uniquely seeded.The present rate of Aadhaar linking to bank accounts is around 1.8 crore per month which was about 60 lakhs per month prior to demonetization.

More than 97 banks are live on e-KYC and 119 banks are live on Aadhaar Enabled Payment System (AEPS) - a mechanism through which a beneficiary in a remote village, without having access to a bank branch is able to withdraw or deposit money at his doorstep by giving his Aadhaar and fingerprint on a micro-ATM. Post demonetization, from 9th November 2016 till 15th January over 8.39 crore AEPS transactions have happened in the field. Of which over 3.73 crore transactions took place in December 2016 and 2.06 crore transactions in first 15 days of January 2017. Earlier AEPS transactions were about 2.57 crore and 2.69 crore in October and November 2016 respectively.

Similarly, Aadhaar Payment Bridge (APB), a seamless payment facility, which enables disbursal of benefits /other payments directly to the beneficiary’s account, has shown considerable growth in the past two years. Total number of transactions on the APB were logged at 167.36 crore worth Rs.44,967 crore which has risen by ten folds in value since 31st May 2014.

Fresh impetus has been provided to Aadhaar by linking it to various schemes and initiatives. The table below gives the progress in Aadhaar seeding in some of these schemes:

Annexure

Benefit accrued on account for DBT/ Aadhaar since 2014

For FY 2014-15 *

For FY 2015-16 *