A month before the expiry of the deadline, around 80 per cent of bank accounts and 60 per cent of mobile connections have been linked with national biometric identifier Aadhaar, according to a senior official at UIDAI.
The government has mandated submission of the 12-digit unique identity number by every bank account holder by March 31, 2018 to weed out unaccounted wealth.
For the same purpose, Aadhaar linking with income-tax permanent account number or PAN has also been made mandatory. By March 31, all mobile SIM cards are also to be linked with Aadhaar to establish the identity of mobile phone users.
Out of the 1.09 billion banks accounts, almost 870 million have been seed with Aadhaar, said the official of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), which issues the national ID number.Of this, 58 0 million have already been verified while in case of the rest the authentication process is underway with the documents that have been submitted to the banks, the official said.
The official further said that as against the 1.42 billion active mobile connections, 857 million have already been linked with Aadhaar.
When contacted, UIDAI CEO Ajay Bhushan Pandey told PTI: "Yes, about 80 per cent of the bank accounts have been seeded with Aadhaar, and we hope that the remaining will be covered soon…
Financial losses caused to banks and genuine account holders through identity frauds will be curbed." With over 1.2 billion residents already enrolled for Aadhaar — a unique 12-digit number backed by fingerprints, iris scans and certain demographic details — the programme today is the world's largest biometric database.