Aadhar cards soon to start providing debit/credit card facilities

New Delhi: Taking a step forward in 'Digital India' mission, the government is planning to increase the use of Aadhar for cashless transactions using the Aadhar Enabled Payment System.

In the future scheme, the Aadhar cardholders will be provided with the facility of debiting or crediting money to their bank accounts, linked with their Aadhar. The only thing the users will have to do is to enter their Aadhar id number and undergo a fingerprint or iris scanner verification to complete the transaction.

Addressing the media persons at Niti Aayog about the substitutes of physical currency, Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) CEO Ajay Bhushan Pandey said, "Currently, we are having 1.31 crore transactions every day through Aadhar and we have the capacity of handling up to 10 crore transactions on daily basis. We are expanding our range and would soon be able to manage 40 crore transactions per day."

Talking about the concern of privacy related to Aadhar-enabled transactions, Pandey said, "The Aadhar laws are formed in such a way that we can't determine if a certain transaction is a credit, debit or anything else. This ensures utmost privacy for all such Aadhar-linked operations."

Niti Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant claimed that very soon the government would launch an Android mobile app that would allow the users to access the Aadhar-linked banking services.

"In next 15 days, there will be an Android app to enable cell phones with external or in-built retina and fingerprint scanners to make these services functional," he added.

Kant further said that the government is also going to enhance the ambit of four other cashless transaction services.

Naming the services, he said these will be Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) for GSM phones, e-Wallets and Unified Payments Interface for smartphones, and debit, credit and prepaid cards for PoS machines.