From January 31, 2025, the central government has extended Aadhaar authentication to non-government entities to promote social welfare, good governance, and innovation.
Mumbai, February 5, 2024: The central government has extended the Aadhaar authentication facility to the private sector to enable good governance, said Mr Manish Bhardwaj, Deputy Director General, Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI).
Speaking at the 3rd Edition of Bharat Fintech Summit 2025, Mr Bharadwaj said that from January 31, 2025, non-government entities have been allowed to request for Aadhaar authentication to promote good governance, and ease of doing business. With 250 successful used cases so far, UIDAI is expected to launch a portal for onboarding of nongovernmental entities for Aadhaar Authentication Services
“The ambit of KYC has been opened and in the coming months we will see many use cases emerge, especially in sectors such as travel and tourism, transport, entertainment, healthcare and employment services. E-commerce entities can come in, credit rating bureaus and agencies can benefit from this,” said Mr Bhardwaj.
The provision for extending the Aadhaar authentication services to private entities was made under the subrule (1) of rule 3 of Aadhaar Authentication for Good Governance (Social Welfare, Innovation, Knowledge (SWIK)) Rules, 2020. It is in the ‘the interest of good governance preventing leakage of public funds, permitting ease of living of resident and enabling better access to services’.
Mr Bharadwaj also announced success of face authentication using mobile phones for KYC. The central authority is also working on enabling customised KYC for private entities, who can verify specific attributes.
“Using the twin modalities of the face authentication and the KYC process, one can easily onboard a customer through the customer facing app. On the customer facing app, we are also trying to add the feature to update a customer’s mobile number on the Aadhaar database in real time,” Mr Bhardwaj added.
The Bharat Fintech Summit brings together experts and innovators from India’s banking, finance, services and insurance industry. An annual industry conference, the summit brings to light new developments and challenges for the industry. Bhardwaj, who delivered the keynote speech at the summit, highlighted the role played by UIDAI as the foundational digital platform infrastructure in India. Launched in 2010, UIDAI is the biggest unique identification program in the world and has pushed the development agenda for India. So far 141 crore Aadhar numbers have been issued, and 14,000 crore authentication transactions processed.
“The vision of Aadhaar was to provide digital identity to each and every Indian. It should have been a verifiable identity, unique, biometric. Through this identity it was intended to reach out to the billions of people who had no identity documents of their own and provide social welfare benefits,” he added.
In achieving this vision, UIDAI has spawned a huge churning in the financial sector as the number of financial accounts rose with the Jan Dhan Accounts. The India Stack got developed, followed by the launch of Unified Payments Interface (UPI) in 2015.
“This initiative will be a much-needed impetus for the BFSI segment. Together with face recognition for KYC, it will streamline onboarding of new customers and help scale businesses to new heights. It is indeed where the future lies,” said Sameer Singh Jaini, founder and chief executive officer of The Digital Fifth, which is hosting the Bharat Fintech Summit in Mumbai.
