Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has begun tabling the Union Budgets 2017-18 in the parliament. As the year 2016 approached its closing, the country grasped the sudden wave of digitization with the Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s decision of demonetization. In line with this, the implementation of Aadhaar in every process involving the government has also been given a good push. The latest development on Aadhaar is that senior citizens would receive Aadhaar-based smart cards for their health and well being.
Although details were not shared, the Aadhaar-based smart cards would contain health details of senior citizens. Jaitley further said that the pilot service of these cards would take off in 15 cities initially in India beginning this year. The announcement for this new initiative shows how the government is focusing on the path of making Aadhaar the core platform in different services. Very soon, we will be introduced to an Aadhaar-based payment system which will use one’s biometrics for transactions. The recently launched BHIM app has also been integrated with UID for Aadhaar-based transactions.
The government recently said that as of now more than 111 crore citizens in the country have an Aadhaar number, and this unit covers more than 99 percent of the Indian adult population. Post demonetization, the enrollment for Aadhaar also increased to 7 to 8 lakh per day as against 5 to 6 lakh till October 2016. The government also reported an increase of 2.69 crore transactions of Aadhaar-based enabled payments in November 2016, which increased to 3.73 crore in December 2016 and 2.06 crore transactions in the first half of January.
Written with Inputs from BGR