The government will soon roll out the Aadhaar Pay service that will enable people to make and receive payments using their Aadhaar number and biometrics.
Already 14 banks have come on board and talks are on with the others, Electronics and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said. The Aadhaar-based payment system will work without swiping a card or punching in the pin number.
Take for instance a shop owner who has an Android application on his mobile phone with a biometric reading machine. After a buyer has made his purchase, he has to enter the amount in the shopkeeper’s smartphone and put his thumb impression on the biometric reading machine.
The amount entered in the mobile phone will be deducted from the buyer’s bank account and credited to that of the shop owner.
For this, the customer’s bank account has to be linked with the Aadhaar number. The Bharat Interface for Money, the common platform for making quick payments using the Unified Payments Interface, has also been integrated with the Aadhaar-enabled payment system.
The Union minister said the Unique Identification Authority of India has generated 111 crore Aadhaar numbers till Friday.
At present, there are 49 crore bank accounts linked to Aadhaar and every month two crore accounts are being linked to Aadhaar. Till January 15, a total of 11.82 crore direct benefit transfer transactions have been carried out.