12350 - 1,216.8 crore authentications: Govt swamps SC with UID data - TNN

1,216.8 crore authentications: Govt swamps SC with UID data

Dhananjay Mahapatra| TNN | Nov 4, 2017, 02:13 IST

HIGHLIGHTS

• The Centre said over 12.64 crore bank accounts were opened using Aadhaar-based e-KYC.
• The country’s biggest employment mechanism for daily wagers under MGNREGA too saw a surge in use of Aadhaar.
• The government added that linking of Aadhaar with PAN had helped in ensuring “one PAN to one person”.

Representative image

NEW DELHI: Bombarding the Supreme Court with statistics to convince it about ease of doing day-to-day activities with Aadhaar, the Centre said 118.64 crore Indians, which is 88% of the population, had obtained Aadhaar and they used it 1,216.8 crore times for authentication purposes.

"As of today, the total number of Aadhaar-based authentication is 12,168,022,172. Therefore, the Indian population has used Aadhaar-based authentication over 1,216 crore times to authenticate their identities and avail benefits and services under the Aadhaar Act and/or other laws," the Centre said in its affidavit filed through advocate Zoheb Hossain.

Challenging the petitioners' constant complaint that linking of biometrics collected through Aadhaar to banking and other services was a violation of right to privacy, the Centre said over 12.64 crore bank accounts were opened using Aadhaar-based e-KYC. "Over 54.25 crore bank accounts have been seeded with Aadhaar as of October 15. Of the newly-opened 30.54 crore Jan Dhan accounts, over 18.97 crore accounts have used Aadhaar," it said.

The country's biggest employment mechanism for daily wagers under MGNREGA too saw a surge in use of Aadhaar, according to statistics provided by the Centre. "Over 9.54 crore active MGNREGA workers of the existing database of 10.93 crore active workers have seeded their Aadhaar numbers and are receiving their daily wages directly in their bank accounts," it said.

"Of a total 2.83 crore pensioners, 1.48 crore have linked Aadhaar to receive pension directly in bank accounts. Over 1.36 crore residents got passport based on Aadhaar authentication. Over 50 crore SIM cards have been issued using Aadhaar e-KYC service. All these are empirical evidence of the working of Aadhaar and is proof of a robust system of financial inclusion and reliability, which gives confidence to people to adopt the system and use it on a large scale," the Centre said.

It added that the petitioners had failed to consider that "total recorded savings to the government of India from just one scheme — direct benefit transfer — on account of Aadhaar was Rs 57,029 crore in three years, 2014 to 2017. "Therefore, there is a clear public interest in ensuring that various benefits, subsidies and services being offered by the government should reach intended beneficiaries and not to fakes and duplicates, which proliferate the system leading to loss of crores of rupees of public money," the Centre said.

The government said linking of Aadhaar with PAN had helped in ensuring "one PAN to one person". "As many as 11.35 lakh cases of duplicate and fraudulent PAN have been detected and accordingly such PANs have been deleted/deactivated. Out of this, around 10.52 lakh cases pertain to individual cases," the Centre said.

"Fake PANs have facilitated enormous growth of shell companies, which were being used for layering of funds and illegal transfer of such funds to other companies/persons or parked abroad in the guise of remittances against import. The share capital of these shell companies are subscribed by fake shareholders through numerous bank accounts with use of fake PAN cards at the initial stage," it said.

TOP COMMENT

I may sound sarcastic but I question what is the meaning of "privacy" or ''Freedom"? In daily life, we do not have freedom even to breath a fresh and clean air. Homes are like match bo... Read More

Sughosh Bansal

The Centre said use of biometrics for establishing identity was not a new phenomenon brought in by Aadhaar.

"Several authorities — for issuance of passport, road transport for driving licences and for property registrations — require biometrics, including fingerprints for issuing relevant documents for verification of identity. For instance, Section 32A of Registration Act mandatorily requires photograph and fingerprints of each buyer and seller where document relates to transfer of ownership of immovable property," it said.

10056 - Karnataka govt to plug PDS leakages with Aadhaar authentication - Economic Times

Karnataka govt to plug PDS leakages with Aadhaar authentication

The move takes forward Karnataka’s efforts to weed out bogus ration cards by using the beneficiary’s Aadhaar number to validate genuine ones.

Sowmya Aji  |  ET Bureau  |  28 May 2016, 7:27 AM IST

A pilot project carried out by Karnataka for biometric authentication of PDS beneficiaries was a grand success though there were some teething problems. 

Taking forward Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Digital India initiative, the Congress government in Karnataka is trying to fix bugs in the use of Aadhaar to supply food grains through the public distribution system by adopting an old Gujarat model of using food coupons. 

A pilot project using this revised model in Bengaluru, covering the supply of four litres of kerosene a card in mere 50 shops, has shown runaway success: the state has managed to save Rs 12.16 lakh in one month. 

"The feedback has been very good. We are expanding it to other urban areas shortly and then take it to all rural areas," Dinesh Gundu Rao, Karnataka's food and civil supplies minister, told ET. 

The move takes forward Karnataka's efforts to weed out bogus ration cards by using the beneficiary's Aadhaar number to validate genuine ones. About 70% of the 1.08 crore ration card holders in the state have already submitted their Aadhaar numbers and the remaining is expected to be covered by July. 

At least 11 states have already gone in for supply of foodgrains against Aadhaar authentication at the ration shops, in an effort to weed out spurious cards and siphoning from the PDS. However, with the exception of Andhra Pradesh that has shown a saving of Rs 20 crore by using this method in the PDS, biometric authentication at the point of sale (PoS) has become almost a logistical nightmare. 

Karnataka has also set up PoS machines in 3,000 of the state's 20,000 fair-price shops and the experience has left both officials and beneficiaries struggling. Problems include lack of power supply, no battery backup, inadequate Internet connections and difficulties in reading the thumb on several machines. 

"The idea of giving us the rations based only on biometrics is good," says Poosamma, 65, an agarbatti roller at Swatantrapalya, Bengaluru. The problem she faces is a class example of issues with the PoS machine: her fingerprints are worn out due to the job she does. "Often, the PoS machine at our ration shop does not read my finger and it is a constant struggle till it works. This problem needs to be addressed," she says. 

The state's food and civil supplies department says Aadhaar authentication of the beneficiary is the answer, as all 10 fingerprints as well as the iris can be matched. 

By verifying the Aadhaar number against the ration card of the beneficiary, the authentication is done. And instead of doing this verification at the PoS and causing long queues, the beneficiary is given coupons - via SMS or the print ones - to collect rations easily. 

The mobile system is the easiest: the beneficiary sends a message to a number given by the department from the mobile that he or she has registered with Aadhaar. The number automatically works as Aadhaar verification in the F&CS server and a PDS coupon code is sent to the mobile. The beneficiary then shows the mobile code to the fair-price shop and collects his ration. 

For those not mobile-savvy, Aadhaar authentication is done either at the gram panchayat's kiosks in rural areas and civic centres like Bengaluru One in urban. Beneficiaries will be given paper coupons for six months against one authentication, which they will present to the shops. 

"It is an idea whose time has come. It will be a game changer," says the department's secretary, Harsh Gupta. "The Gujarat model using print coupons was very successful. 

We felt we could solve the problem of biometric authentication each time the beneficiary needs to pick up rations by giving them multi-month coupons against one authentication." 

ET visited a very backward part of Bengaluru, where the poorest, who use kerosene for cooking, are getting printed coupons in the pilot phase. They are not able to figure out the mobile method. 

Valliamma Ramamurthy, Rukmini Govindaraj and Shanti Gopal are at the Bengaluru One centre in Srirampuram for the third time this week, as the server was not connecting to the F&CS one each time they came. "I could have spent the money on a meal rather than on autos to reach this place each time," Valliamma says, while Shanti frets about having missed the domestic work she does at various homes to make time to collect coupons. 

They agree they have to be authenticated to get their rations. "We don't want other people to take our rations or siphon off subsidies in our name. Authentication is needed, but we wish the governments and services will get their act together and make supply for us hassle-free," Rukmini says. 

The server works at that moment and she is all smiles, as her coupon has been printed out in a minute. 

"Don't worry," F&CS deputy directors Sharanbasappa and Rajanna assure her. "Next time, we will give you three-month coupons and you will have fewer hassles." 

M Ramamurthy, who runs a cooperative fair-price shop in the same area, also needs convincing. "I am opening an app on my smartphone, scanning the barcode on the coupon the beneficiaries bring, uploading the bill and the coupon on to the server and giving people their kerosene quota. I am all for technology, but it is taking me 10 minutes to serve one person," he rues. 

"We are looking at the problems and how to solve them. These are still less than the errors and the problems the PoS machines have caused," minister Rao contended. 

Karnataka's Centre for e-Governance chief executive Rathan U Kelkar said the process of verifying all the ration card data against Aadhaar would start in a few days. "We are looking at a software that Andhra Pradesh used to authenticate data. They have used voice to pronounce names also, rather than just read it. We will decide on this in a few days and do the verification of the ration card database," he said.

10054 - PMO happy as 13 crore people used Aadhaar for IDs and received benefits in March - Economic Times

PMO happy as 13 crore people used Aadhaar for IDs and received benefits in March

By Aman Sharma, ET Bureau | 28 May, 2016, 02.02AM IST

“This is the ultimate test of Aadhaar – whether people are actively using it to receive a service or benefit,” a senior government official said.

NEW DELHI: Over 13 crore people , the highest-ever for any month, used their Aadhaar this March to authenticate their identity and receive a government benefit or service, as per latest figures submitted to the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) at a meeting chaired by the PM earlier this month. 

"This is the ultimate test of Aadhaar - whether people are actively using it to receive a service or benefit," a senior government official said, adding that PMO was enthused over the response and expects over 150 Cr Aadhaar authenticated transactions in 2016. "The online authentication platform is capable of handling 10 crore transactions daily," UIDAI chief AB Pandey told ET earlier this week. 

As per details with ET, nearly 174 Cr Aadhaar authenticated transactions have been carried out since inception of the facility till May 15 this year by over 42 Cr Aadhaar number holders out of the 101 Cr people with Aadhaar numbers as of today. Only 8.82 Cr Aadhaar authenticated transactions happened under the UPA. Things picked under the Modi government -about 47 Cr Aadhaar authenticated transactions were done in year 2015. 

The UIDAI chief told ET that authentication was also the way of sharing data, when asked about the tussle with Registrar General of India (RGI). "RGI can use our authentication mechanism. If they want to confirm whether the name of a person in the National Population Register is the same person or not, he can put his biometric and Aadhaar number, and his details will appear. So in this way, the data is being shared," Pandey said. 

The UIDAI chief said the system also ensures safety of data and privacy issues. "It is most optimal that data remains at one place and everyone uses the authentication mechanism. RGI may also like to do that. Rather than biometrics lying at 10 different places and everyone worrying about protecting privacy of data, we have said this is how we will authenticate," Pandey said. The Aadhaar Act says core biometric data will not be shared. 

Officials say authentication mechanism of UIDAI ensures any requesting authority obtains consent of Aadhaar number holder before authentication, inform the purpose of authentication and ensure that the collected identity information is used only for submission and no core biometric information is retained by the requesting authority.

9787 - Indian telecoms regulator: Digital ID can slash activation costs - Planet Biometrics

Indian telecoms regulator: Digital ID can slash activation costs 

08 April 2016 16:05 GMT

- See more at: http://www.planetbiometrics.com/article-details/i/4348/desc/indian-telecoms-regulator-digital-id-can-slash-activation-costs/#sthash.8sLDCLgW.dpuf

The chairman of India’s telecoms regulator says that use of digital identities, biometrics and the country’s Aadhaar ID number can cut new account activation costs to zero. TRAI chairman R S Sharma told the Business Standard that if electronic KYC is conducted via Aadhaar then transaction costs are reduced substantially. "If you are taking a mobile connection, currently the cost of activation of a mobile customer is Rs 150 because you have to fill a customer acquisition form (CAF), you have to give paper documents… If you use digital identity authentication, you can fill the customer form, digitally sign it and get your electronic KYC. So, essentially the cost is equal to zero," Sharma said at the annual growth Net in Delhi. 

When he served as the UIDAI Director General and then as Department of Electronics and IT (Deity) Secretary, Sharma had earlier recommended make the whole process paperless. 

Linking Sim card registrations to identities is an increasingly hot topic in South Asia, with neighbouring countries Pakistan and Bangladesh undergoing biometric SIM registration for the whole mobile population.  

- See more at: http://www.planetbiometrics.com/article-details/i/4348/desc/indian-telecoms-regulator-digital-id-can-slash-activation-costs/#sthash.8sLDCLgW.dpuf

9669 - On paper, electrified villages — in reality, darkness - The Hindu

March 26, 2016

On paper, electrified villages — in reality, darkness

• SAMARTH BANSAL
• 
  The Hindu
  “As of April 1, 2015, according to government numbers, 18,452 Indian villages were still un-electrified.” File Photo 

The Centre claims to be fulfilling the Prime Minister’s plan for full rural electrification. But a close check of its own real-time data shows that the gap between official claims and ground reality is stark

Haldu Khata, a village in Bijnor district of Uttar Pradesh, is one of the 7,008 villages that the government claims to have “electrified” in the last year, under the Modi government’s flagship scheme of rural electrification, Deendayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana. However, according to the government’s own field engineers, there is no electrical infrastructure in the village. Similarly, Dimatala in Assam, Kadam Jheriya in Chhattisgarh, Buknari in Bihar and Sunwara in Madhya Pradesh are misclassified as electrified villages in government books. These are not exceptional cases. The Hindu’s analysis of rural electrification data shows that the number of villages said to be electrified in the last year is exaggerated.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in his Independence Day speech of 2015, had announced that all remaining villages would be electrified within 1,000 days. As of April 1, 2015, according to government numbers, 18,452 Indian villages were still un-electrified. Note that a village is considered electrified if public places in the village and 10 per cent of its households have access to electricity.

To make the process transparent, real-time data on villages being electrified has been made available to the public through a mobile app and a Web dashboard called GARV. The platform was launched in October 2015. Alongside, 309 Gram Vidyut Abhiyantas (GVAs) were deployed by the government to monitor the electrification process and enter the data on the GARV application.

Discrepancies galore

One major source of discrepancy is regarding those villages where the GVA has noted that the village is un-electrified, yet it is counted as electrified on the app. The Hindu was able to spot over 30 such villages on the app after scanning through GVAs’ comments. When this discrepancy was pointed out, a senior official of the Rural Electrification Corporation (REC), the nodal agency for rural electrification which functions under the aegis of the Ministry of Power, said: “We put a lot of emphasis on photos. If there is a pole and distribution line visible in the photos, we call it electrified.” This perhaps could be one of the reasons leading to the inflated number, as the presence of electrical infrastructure doesn’t automatically translate into electrification.

A GVA from Pagara Buzurg village in Neemuch district of Madhya Pradesh told The Hindu that the contractor did set up power lines in the village but they were stolen before they could be charged, and now there is no electricity in the village. Neither does a conductor exist there. For Birni village in Giridih, Jharkhand, the GVA remarks: “Work not started. Village located in remote location. No roads to reach. Situated on mountains..naxalite affected area (sic).” Both villages are counted as electrified villages.

Conversations with GVAs reflect the gap between official data and ground realities. The Hindu found 342 villages where the status marked by the GVA was ‘e0’, which means un-electrified (‘ee’ and ‘en’ mean electrified). And yet, in the ‘overall’ category, all of these villages have been marked as electrified.

Further, as of March 10, 2016, for around 300 villages, the status said: “Village declared electrified by discom [power distribution company]. GVA yet to visit the village for verification.” This indicates that villages have been declared as electrified without waiting for the government’s own representative’s verification, rendering the monitoring system redundant. For many others, a pattern is observed where the date of electrification is way before the first visit made by GVA. And further, if the GVA marks it as un-electrified after visiting, the status is not updated from ‘electrified’ to ‘un-electrified’.

Another concern is that uninhabited villages have been marked as electrified. The villages Panalomali, Kusadangar, Patyetapali in Odisha and Sunwara in Madhya Pradesh — all counted as electrified villages — have no people residing there. Reading comments in the application, more such villages were found by The Hindu, such as Akbarpur in Muzaffarnagar district of Uttar Pradesh, which is a forest area.

Statistical jugglery

Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in his Budget speech of 2016 said that the number of villages electrified in the last year was more than the combined number in the past three years. This claim may not be true, as The Hindu found that of the 7,000-plus villages said to be electrified last year, 3,604 villages were assigned the status, “Village found electrified during the survey.” This means that these villages were found electrified when GVAs first visited there. The REC official explained, “It is difficult to say when the work was done as the GVA visits started in October 2015. It could have happened after April 2015 (when the list of un-electrified villages was prepared in consultation with State governments), maybe two years ago or even earlier.” Conversations with GVAs and comments from the dashboard indicate that perhaps even the list of un-electrified villages was an overestimate. For instance, Changlang (Arunachal Pradesh) was electrified in 2001, Farbandhia Kahar (Assam) in 2012 and Mahdaili (Bihar) in 2013. But they were shown as un-electrified on the April 2015 list. It is also worth noting that work is ongoing even in villages declared as electrified; called “intensive electrification”, this aims to cover all households and not just 10 per cent.

A detailed questionnaire mailed to the REC on March 19 seeking its official response went unanswered.

The count of villages being electrified, ticking upward every day in the GARV application — extensively shared by Union Power Minister Piyush Goyal on social media and cited by Prime Minister Modi in his speeches — is thus not a guarantee that all villages being claimed as electrified are actually so.

samarth.bansal@thehindu.co.in

Also read:

Here, the light goes out of their lives at sunset  For residents of two villages in Bijnor district of Uttar Pradesh, their ‘electrified’ status on paper is a cruel joke. Read more

Keywords: Deendayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana, rural electrification, Gram Vidyut Abhiyantas, rural electrification data

Comment:

This is the India that is going to get DBT through Aadhaar based authentication! Like rural electrification, DBT is also going to be virtual!

Anupam Saraph.

9302 - Editorial: The coming PDS reforms - Financial Express

Editorial: The coming PDS reforms

Most ration shops in AP do Aadhaar-authentication.

By: The Financial Express | February 1, 2016 8:56 AM

All ration cards in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana have been seeded with Aadhaar, but the progress in Uttar Pradesh is a poor 20%. (Reuters)

Though the progress on using direct benefits transfer (DBT) to give cash to those buying food in ration shops in the public distribution system (PDS) is still limited—mainly LPG subsidies flow through DBT—there has been progress in eliminating fake users in ration shops, though this is limited to a handful of states so far. Going by the progress, within a year or so, the government may well be able to boast of the kind of savings the prime minister talked of in the case of LPG subsidies—in his Independence-Day speech, he spoke of saving R15,000 crore a year by weeding out fake customers. The savings are to take place at three levels—by cutting out theft as the grain moves from FCI godowns to ration shops, by weeding out fake ration cards and by ensuring that all those with genuine ration cards get all the rations due to them.

A total of 11 states have, so far, automated their supply-chain. This does not yet include the populous state of Uttar Pradesh—Bihar, though, has implemented this. Almost 40% of all ration cards have been seeded with Aadhaar numbers which means that, as far as these cards are concerned, there are no fake users. All ration cards in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana have been seeded with Aadhaar, but the progress in Uttar Pradesh is a poor 20%. The advantage of this is that, in the process of the Aadhaar seeding itself, a large number of fake users get removed. In the case of Andhra Pradesh, for instance, while there were 4.53 crore ration card users before the seeding was done, this fell to 3.86 crore after the seeding; for Telangana, the number fell from 3.08 crore to 2.82 crore and from 0.96 crore to 0.70 crore in the case of Delhi. In states like Andhra Pradesh, this has been taken even further by giving each ration shop a point of sale (PoS) device where, when the ration is taken, the PoS device captures the buyers’ biometrics and verifies them online with the Aadhaar database to ensure the person at the ration shop is the same individual in whose name the ration card has been issued or a member of his/her family. While there is a possibility that the number of users may further fall with this second level of check, the most important thing is that once this is fully done, there will be no diversion of grain. At a national level, the progress is very poor at just 13%—once again, Andhra Pradesh is at the top with nearly all its ration shops equipped with PoS devices. What is heartening, however, is that once the Aadhaar seeding is done, ensuring each ration shop has a PoS device is relatively simple. This is one big reform the Modi government can justifiably be proud of, and the Congress can feel satisfied that it set the ball in motion.

First Published on February 1, 2016 1:14 am

7171 - - TNN

Nilekani moots simple 2-factor authentication

TNN | Jan 6, 2015, 06.05AM IST

BENGALURU: Former UIDAI chairman Nandan Nilekani said a sub $100 smartphone with an iris-recognition camera would be available in a year or two and that would enable users to do a one-click two factor authentication — the mobile number would be one factor and the iris-based biometric authentication of Aadhaar number would be the second. 

"One of the big challenges in the financial sector is how to combine accuracy with security. The world over, when you do a financial transaction, you do a one factor authentication, but In India, we have a two factor authentication. It's complicated, as you have to enter something and get an OTP (one time password)," Nilekani said at the 28th International Conference on VLSI Design in Bengaluru on Monday. 

Taxi hailing app Uber came under the RBI scanner recently for not complying with two-factor authentication. The fallout forced Uber to switch to a mobile wallet, a less convenient form since customers have to keep refilling these wallets. 

"As sensors get popular and cheaper, the next generation of smartphones will have iris cameras built into them," Nilekani said. 

The VLSI conference discussed at length the emerging internet-of-things (IoT) ecosystem. VLSI or very-large-scale integration is the process of creating an integrated circuit by combining thousands of transistors into a single chip. 

Kumud Srinivasan, Intel India president and co-chair of the conference, said that as IoT took off in India, there would be more startup activity and so more potential for investment for funds like Intel Capital.

2374 - UIDAI Launches Web Based Authentication Interface For Aadhaar - Media Nama

By Anupam Saxena on Feb 8th, 2012

The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has rolled out a web interface for online authentication of Aadhaar numbers, reports The Economic Times. The interface would allow banks, telecom companies and government departments to authenticate an Indian resident on the basis of his Aadhaar number or UID, in accordance with KYC norms and process his application on the same basis. MediaNama readers would recall that apart from Yes or No responses, Aadhaar does not send any other data back. Also the agency had said that it will limit the number of verification attempts per ID, to prevent misuse. The service will be available free of charge till December 2013, post which, it’s likely to become a paid service, when the authority formulates a mechanism and fixes a price. The agencies that want to authenticate users require a license key, but we do not know how UIDAI has integrated this with the web interface. We were not able to find a direct link to the web interface.

The web authentication interface could also act as a self service verification system for non-critical applications where additional factors such as biometric verification are not required. For example, instead of a one time password, banks could use Aadhaar numbers to authenticate an online transaction from a customer. It could also be used for verifying online user accounts including Twitter and Facebook accounts, as UIDAI Chairman Nandan Nilekani, had indicated at one of the developer conferences.

Aadhaar had already declared its plans for integrating the UID with third party applications through API calls. Nilekani had said that API calls for third party authentication applications would be free of charge, for the next couple of years.

1755 - UID project to face first major test next month - Economic Times

31 OCT, 2011, 05.04AM IST, DEVIKA BANERJI,ET BUREAU

NEW DELHI: The unique ID project will be put to its first major test next month in Jharkhand, where it will be used to authenticate 'Aadhar' numbers on a real-time basis and transfer funds to beneficiaries of a social sector scheme.

The identification system will be synced to the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme in five blocks of the state early next month, Nandan Nilekani, the chairman of the Unique ID Authority of India, said. The state government and banks will use this database to open bank accounts and transfer funds for thousands of beneficiaries under the Centre's flagship scheme.

The authority, asked with issuing a unique 12-digit 'Aadhaar' number to all Indian residents, is banking on the success of the pilot project to build a case for more funds and wider scale of coverage. It is also hoping to counter recent criticism of its administrative structure and expenditure.

"We have just started a pilot project linked to NREGA in Jharkhand and by next month we will launch the first online authentication system, which can give banks access to the details of beneficiaries online," Nilekani said. The 'Aadhaar' number will be the key to the holder's personal details and is meant to serve as a single source of authentication for a host of public services.

Through this, the authority hopes to check embezzlement of public funds and weed out fake identities. The result of the Jharkhand project will help authorities decide whether the system can be scaled up and used nationwide for opening bank accounts, issuing of driving licences, ration cards, passports, etc.

"This will also be used to enable payments through business correspondents in NREGA using a biometric authentication system," Nilekani added. So far, the Reserve Bank of India and the finance ministry have mandated the UIDAI number as a valid "know-your--customer" document for opening bank accounts, but are yet to allow online verification.

The authority, which has enrolled around 110 million people in its systems, is talking to various stakeholders, such as telecom department, to make 'Aadhaar' a valid document to access services. Nilekani said that three states have recognised the system's identity proof for various government services.

"We are trying to make more state governments agree to this," he added. The authority has come under fire from some government departments over its functioning and spending. In September, the Registrar General of India (RGI), which is also collecting biometric data as part of its National Population Register, said the data collected by UIDAI's registrar agencies was not reliable, as they were not following the parameters set for the NPR.

The criticism led to UIDAI's demand for Rs 15,000 crore to scale-up coverage being rejected by the Expenditure Finance Commission last month. "The Registrar General has expressed some reservations on using the data collected by non NPR registrars. That is the only contention which will be resolved by the cabinet," Nilekani said.

The decision on whether UIDAI-appointed registrars can collect data will be taken by the Cabinet Committee on UIDAI. The UIDAI was also criticised by some sections of the Planning Commission on its administrative structure while the country's official auditor, CAG, initiated a pilot performance audit on the authority on October 3.

"We have resolved all issues and are doing our job. The CAG is doing its job. We have nothing to hide. It's all transparent," Nilekani said.