Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s scheme to curb corruption and black money in India may have created a chaos in the country but it has also provided a tremendous boost to his digital India dream. Past one month has witnessed a remarkable increase in online transactions. E-commerce websites are flourishing and even the small merchants are gradually shifting to card-based transactions.
Taking a hint from PM Modi’s speech wherein he said that we have all the resources needed to turn India into a digital economy, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has come up with a plan to turn the Aadhaar card the base of all digital transactions.
Here’s what you need to know:
What’s the plan?
The plan is to make Aadhaar card the base of all transactions by developing a smartphone app that can be used by the merchants to receive payments by bypassing debit and credit cards, ATM PINs and passwords.
How will that happen?
The trick is to link people’s bank accounts with their Aadhaar cards and use Aadhaar Enabled Payment System (AEPS) for fund transfer, balance enquiry, cash deposits or withdrawals and inter-banking transactions. At present subscribers of 118 public and private sector banks have access to this facility.
Is it secure?
Though it is a smartphone based app, the government is planning to use biometrics like iris and fingerprint scanners making the transaction completely secure.
How is government planning to execute it?
Apart from increasing the capacity of biometric authentication capacity from 10 crores a day to 40 crores a day, the government is asking the mobile phone manufacturers to see if all mobiles made in India can be inbuilt with iris or thumb identification system to facilitate Aadhaar-based system.
Also, the IT department is providing an incentive of Rs 100 for every merchant enrolled through over two lakh common service centres across the country.
