Indian mobile account links and Aadhaar authentications leap in February

The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) announced that the country recorded 2.26 billion Aadhaar authentications in February, bringing the total number of Aadhaar authentication transactions so far to 92.55 billion.

Aadhaar authentication is a process by which Indian citizens and residents submit their Aadhaar, a unique 12-digit identity number, alongside demographic or biometric information for verification. A majority of the authentications of Aadhaar, the world’s largest biometric ID system, are carried out by using fingerprints.

Over 10.97 million mobile numbers were seeded in Aadhaar in February, a jump of more than 93 percent over the previous month, UIDAI said in a press release. The government body has been encouraging citizens to link their Aadhaar with their mobile numbers for better communication while using welfare and other services. More than 267 million online KYC transactions were also carried out during this month, reaching a total of 14.39 billion.

“Adoption of e-KYC has reduced customer acquisition cost of entities like financial institutions, telecom service providers and others,” the UIDAI said in its statement.

Countries around the world are considering following the Aadhaar example to develop their digital ID projects, but the system has also faced controversies.

In January, UIDAI said it would expand the use of Aadhaar, announcing new guidelines for informed consent while submitting personal information, and a liveness detection capability has been added to the authentication mechanism.

Article Topics

Aadhaar  |  biometric authentication  |  digital ID  |  India  |  KYC  |  UIDAI