Phase II of Aadhaar aims to ramp up enrollment

The second phase of India’s Aadhaar project aims to enrol 400 million residents by 2014, according to the country’s 2012-2013 Economic Survey.

Reported today in the Financial Chronicle, as of December 2012, approximately 250 million Aadhaar numbers have been generated and about 200 million Aadhaar letters have been distributed.

According to the Financial Chronicle report, the UIDAI has also established infrastructure to generate 1 million Aadhaar numbers per day, and to process 10 million authentication transactions per day.

Whether or not the Aadhaar program is actually on track has been a hard assertion to make as of late, as in many ways it is behind, though there are also many positive signs suggesting it is on track and accelerating.

Reported in BiometricUpdate.com, enrolment, the opening of banks accounts and the distribution of Aadhaar cards had slowed to such an extent in Andhra Pradesh that it was expected it could take at least six months to complete.

On the other hand, Aadhaar enrolment has now reached 282.66 million, representing a significant jump, owed widely to the launch of the direct transfer scheme, launched earlier this year. In May 2012, enrollment stood at 4.76 million, whereas enrollment for February 2013 already sits at 9.01 million and in January, enrollment stood at 24.79 million.

Late last year, UIDAI discovered and cancelled 384,000 Aadhaar numbers of the total 410,000 Aadhaar numbers issued under the biometric exception clause, created as a part of an elaborate scheme exploiting this clause to generate capital, as enrollment agencies are paid a nominal amount of money per enrollment.

Article Topics

Aadhaar  |  biometrics  |  civil ID  |  government  |  identification  |  identity management