Aadhaar linkage is a pivotal medium to avoid discrepancies in service delivery. It is sustainable and its significance is never going to fade, according to Sumnesh Joshi, Additional Director General, Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI).
The Central Government is strongly pushing the idea of syncing Aadhaar with the bank accounts and mobile phones because that will help the authorities in collecting actual data pertaining to the number of users, said Joshi while addressing a session at the recently commenced NBFC100 Tech Summit in Mumbai.
Linking Aadhaar with bank accounts, mobile numbers and several other services has been made mandatory by the Centre to avoid data discrepancy.
“If every bank account is linked with Aadhaar, then the number of actual bank account will reflect in the National Payments Corporation of India’s mapper. As on date, we have 53.69 crore bank accounts on the mapper. So it is proved that 53.69 crore individuals have bank accounts,” Joshi added.
This linkage is also significant in ensuring the actual number of mobile phone users in the country.
“For instance, we have x number of mobile numbers but we don’t know whether each and every individual in the country has mobile phone. So mobile linking with the Aadhaar will help in getting the correct details of the actual number of the persons having mobile phones,” he added.
“This is helping us to fill the gaps. Aadhaar is a sustainable thing and its significance is never going to fade,” said Joshi.
Everyone is aware that the Central Government in association with the State Governments is taking several measures to ensure digitisation across the country. Moving a step the Centre rolled out the demonetisation drive. Now the target is to transform India into a cashless society and the financial sector, in particular, has a very important role to play in this regard.
“NBFCs specifically have a significant role to incorporate in the digitisation of financial services and several new players like payments banks, small finance banks etc are ensuring the same. But there is still a long way to go as far as complete digitisation is concerned. There is a need to ensure the infrastructure in place and design the applications to promote all digital payments,” he added.
In addition to this, JAM trinity i.e Jan Dhan, Aadhar, Mobile (JAM) is acting as a major tool in securing this digital implementation.
“118 crore Aadhaars have been issued, 70 crore bank accounts have been opened and this process will be further accelerated with the help of small finance banks,” added Joshi.
