UIDAI’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Saurabh Garg, expects Aadhaar to become more contactless and secure in the future.
Garg said “There are two activities which are anyway ongoing to make Aadhaar contactless. You have the OTP service, which comes on the phone, and we have recently introduced face authentication in certain services, and we are now expanding it to the banking and financial services sectors. So face authentication will also help to make it more contactless and seamless,”
UIDAI had issued 131.68 crore Aadhaar numbers to Indian citizens as of September.
In future, Aadhaar can also be used to boost cybersecurity. Aadhar has been used with liveness detection in modalities such as fingerprint and facial identification to combat fraud, according to Garg, who also stated that UIDAI is now aiming to use mobile phones as a universal authenticator. He did say, though, that it would take some time.
“Aadhar is like a digital infrastructure which provides the basis for a KYC. Without a seamless KYC, no financial player would like to interact with any individual and it is there where I think the Aadhaar is playing its role in the public infrastructure,” Garg said, adding that UIDAI’s goal will be to make Aadhaar more seamless in the future.
He said that over the last four to five years, FinTech innovations such as Aadhar have revolutionised the concept.
“The Aadhaar payment bridge enables the government to directly transfer funds to accounts of individuals and we have seen about 10 crore such credits happening every month for the past few years,” he said, adding that the figure cumulatively rounds off to nearly 880 crore.
Individuals can withdraw cash from bank accounts using Aadhar enabled payment systems, which witnesses around 50 crore transactions every month.