UIDAI reaches out to states to enhance their involvement in Aadhaar ecosystem

The plan, the official said, is to encourage states to use the Aadhaar authentication system better for their locally run schemes for various purposes, such as de-duplication of beneficiaries and weeding out of ghost beneficiaries.

Officials from the UIDAI have also been meeting state government officials to understand better how the usage of Aadhaar can be improved for their own systems, the official said.

As of date, roughly 1000 state and central government-run schemes use Aadhaar for authentication of beneficiaries. Of these, there are 650-state-run schemes, while around 314 central government-run and sponsored projects use the biometric authentication of the Aadhaar ecosystem.

Further, the official said that the UIDAI will soon allow the use of face-authentication through citizens’ smartphones so that the Aadhaar data can be better leveraged for better access to government-run services.

“Our approach is having a secure two-factor authentication so that the residents can use smartphone and mobile number registered with Aadhaar database for simple transactions and avail government’s services,” the official said.

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The range of service providers for face authentication as well as fingerprint and biometric data will be expanded to include services such as e-commerce, mobile and unified payment interface and other small, micro-merchants, the official said.

To ensure residents’ data is always authentic and updated, the UIDAI is also likely to nudge Aadhaar-card holders to update their fingerprint, face, iris and other data every 10 years, the official said.

“In many cases, residents move and their address or phone number changes. While these can be updated, we will also run campaigns to encourage people to keep updating all of their data every 10 years so that the database remains fresh,” the official said.