111 crore enroll to Aadhaar as savings touch Rs 36,144 crore, says Ravi Shankar Prasad

Even as the Aadhaar enrolment touched 111 crore on Republic Day, the total savings by the central and state exchequers by deploying it stood at Rs 36,144 crore in two years, IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said here on Friday. The chunk of the savings came from the government’s Pahal scheme for cooking gas cylinders where money is deposited directly in the consumers’ accounts which are linked with Aadhaar. In 2014-15, the government saved Rs 14,672 crore, and in 2015-16, Rs 6,912 crore on account of Pahal scheme. “Aadhaar generation has crossed the 111+ crore mark. It’s a great achievement towards inclusion of everyone into national development fabric. It has come a long way in less than six and a half years of its journey from being a unique identification programme to transform itself into a critical development tool of public-centric good governance and targeted delivery of services, benefits and subsidies,” the Minister said. Aadhaar enrolment ecosystem with 135 registrars and 612 enrolment agencies working at 47,192 enrolment stations has been enrolling and updating 7-8 lakh requests per day, Prasad said. “Aadhaar generation as on May 31, 2014 was 63.22 crore with a per day enrolment and update trend of about 3-4 lakh which remained around 5-6 lakh per day till October 2016. However, since demonetisation the Aadhaar enrolment and update requests are in the range of 7-8 lakh per day,” he added. Dispelling apprehensions on privacy and data security, Prasad said: “The Government is vigilant towards privacy protection and database security which is our paramount concern. We have Aadhaar Act 2016 which has strict provisions for protection of data and privacy.” As of now, more than 47 crore bank accounts have been seeded with Aadhaar number out of which 38.5 crore are uniquely seeded. The present rate of Aadhaar linking to bank accounts is around 1.8 crore per month which was about 60 lakh per month prior to demonetisation. Post demonetization, from Nov 9, 2016 till Jan 15 over 8.39 crore Aadhaar Enabled Payment System (AEPS) transactions have happened in the field, of which over 3.73 crore transactions took place in December 2016 and 2.06 crore transactions in first 15 days of January 2017. Earlier AEPS transactions were about 2.57 crore and 2.69 crore in October and November 2016 respectively. IANS