UIDAI orders banks, govt departments to upgrade systems for Virtual IDs by August

The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has extended the deadline for banks and government departments to upgrade their systems so that they can process the 16-digit **virtual identity number**  for transactions from August. [caption id=“attachment_4291519” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”]  Biometric authentication of Aadhaar. Image: Getty[/caption] According to a report by the Economic Times, UIDAI has begun levying charges of 20 paise per transactions from companies that do not have the new system in place. The previous deadline was set for 1 July. The move to extend the deadline was welcomed by all the stakeholders. Banks and various companies were facing problems regarding the VIDs. These problems included failure in generating VIDs and lack of awareness among the people about the virtual identity number. It has been reported that while there have been no problems in generating a VID on the desktop, there have been problems to generate one on a smartphone. Therefore, banks had sought time to extend the deadline to upgrade their systems. The extension has led to Aadhaar enabled payments systems to continue for two more months. The **virtual identity number** was introduced in January 2018 when it was felt that sharing the 12-digit Aadhaar number raised data privacy issues. A virtual identity number is a 16-digit alternate number which can be generated over and over again. This number is supposed to hide the actual Aadhaar number and can be used to authenticate eKYC services and transactions.