About three years after rolling out the first Aadhaar number—the unique 12-digit ID to be issued by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) to every resident of India—the UIDAI has come close to its full service mandate by launching three Aadhaar-enabled services.
Concurrently, the authority also announced the establishment of 565 Aadhaar Kendras or permanent enrollment centers, where all those who missed out on enrollment through the temporary camps set up for the purpose could go to register for Aadhaar as well as to update their previously provided Aadhaar data (name, date of birth, gender, address, photo and mobile/email).
The Aadhaar-enabled services include iris-based authentication, OTP or one-time PIN authentication (through the person’s registered mobile number), and e-KYC or the electronic know-your-customer service (which can be availed of by organizations such as banks, government departments, telecom companies, etc.)
Talking about how these Aadhaar-based services will be a “game changer” in India’s effort to achieve better financial inclusion, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission (under whose ambit UIDAI falls), said, “The current system of providing benefits to the people is not very efficient: it has leakages ranging from 20% to 40%. The new, Aadhaar-based system will massively improve it. I’m told that the error rate in Aadhaar is as low as 0.01%.”
However, Ahluwalia was quick to emphasize that Aadhaar’s mandate is to ensure accuracy of authentication for the beneficiary list provided by the government or whatever system is in place to decide who stands to benefit from various government schemes (such as pension, healthcare, scholarships, etc.) The onus of whom to include for benefits lies with the various government bodies at central and state levels.
It goes without saying that a critical governance challenge remains to prepare such beneficiary lists as are genuine; that is, based on criteria such as low-income groups or meritorious students.
Nevertheless, the prospect of having a unique ID-based authentication system and linking it to various bank accounts for direct transfer of benefits (one of the key government plans for financial inclusion) is sure to weed out a great many “ghost beneficiaries” from the old, paper-based system.
The next big task or challenge, according to Ahluwalia, is to ensure that those millions that were earlier left out of beneficiary schemes and who deserve to receive the benefits are increasingly brought into the fold through Aadhaar.
Addressing the audience at the launch, Nandan Nilekani, Chairman of UIDAI, said, “We have now launched the entire suite of Aadhaar-based services. The challenge now is to scale it up and reach our goal of providing 600 million Aadhaar numbers by 2014.” At the moment, around 400 million people are said to have enrolled for Aadhaar, out of which close to 350 million numbers have been issued.
Nilekani stressed on the strategic nature of Aadhaar numbers and related how the project can drastically cut down distribution and paper costs associated with the existing systems, such as credit and debit cards and paper document-based verifications. The cost savings are enabled by the use of mobile phones and OTPs. Since a vast majority of Indians already own a mobile phone, there is no need to send any physical card or paper to them; they can simply authenticate themselves for various services just by requesting an OTP and confirming the same to the service provider within 30 minutes of receiving it—after which the OTP expires and another one needs to be activated. (This works similar to the OTP authentication that many banks use for credit card transactions and other services).
Vijay Madan, Director Generational and Mission Director, UIDAI, said, “Implicit in this launch is an invitation to the various implementation partners to come forward and provide more Aadhaar-based services.” He also noted that the number of permanent enrollment centers will be soon ramped up to over 1,000. These centers can be located by choosing the relevant tabs on the website of UIDAI, at http://uidai.gov.in.