MUMBAI, INDIA: The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) will meet its deadline to roll out 600 million Aadhar number or unique identity (UID) cards by 2014, said Nandan Nilekani, Chairman of UIDAI at the Nasscom India Leadership Forum 2011 in Mumbai today.
According to Nilekani, the UID cards will play a key role in the financial inclusion of migrant populations. “The UID cards will provide national portability of identity for migrant populations, which would give them access to basic services such as banking and telecom services based on the information provided for UID cards,” he said.
He pointed out that the data or information provided for UID cards will help banks in fulfilling its KYC (know your customer) norms and allowing banks to open no-frill accounts of people. Also, it will be helpful for availing mobile services from telecom operators as the process is the same, Nilekani added.
UIDAI has approached about 2 million people and 80 per cent of them are in need of having banking accounts and so UID will allow mass opening of banking accounts, the chairman said.
“In the next four years, we will open more bank accounts than the number of accounts that have been opened since the Indian banking era started,” he claimed. According to Nilekani, the online authentication process will allow online verification of identity too.
In terms of financial inclusion, he said that UIDAI has undertaken a pilot project with three banks in the state of Jharkhand, where the business correspondents in the rural areas are providing banking services to people using the technology of micro-ATM and online authentication process.
Moreover, the infrastructure of UIDAI is an open platform where APIs can be built on top of it and embedded in various applications to offer new services. The platform architecture will act as foundation for public services such as banking, education and others, and also private sector can build their services through innovation and technology on the same platform, he explained.
“UIDAI is creating an innovation ecosystem under the project where there’s space for enterprises and space for re-engineering public services for future. It can be like an app store for building applications for Aadhar ecosystem,” Nilekani observed.