The department of telecommunications (DoT) has decided to allow the use of unique identification (UID) numbers, which will be issued to all residents of India under the government's Aadhaar project, as proof of identity and address for obtaining telephone connections.
The move will make it easier for millions of people, particularly in the the insurgency-hit states of the North-East and Jammu and Kashmir, to get new phone numbers. It will also help telecom companies save time and expense.
DoT's decision comes a month after the finance ministry said UID was sufficient to meet the know your customer norms, under which banks are expected to verify customers before opening bank accounts or conducting any financial transaction.
“The Aadhaar shall be taken as valid proof of identity (PoI) and proof of address (PoA) after details of identity and address are confirmed through Aadhaar authentication procedure,“ said a DoT notice issued on 14 January. “After implementation of the Aadhaar authentication procedure, it can be used as valid PoI and PoA in Jammu & Kashmir, Assam and north-east service areas also.“
Rajan Mathews, director general of industry lobby group Cellular Operators Association of India, said this will help telcos cut cost substantially. “It removes the need for warehouses to store the millions of customer verification forms or spend time and money scanning and uploading these forms or physical verification (needed in the North- East and Jammu and Kash- mir),“ he said. “If today an operator spends 750-1,000 per subscriber verification, the cost comes down to 150-200 per subscriber. That is immense, given the hundreds of millions of mo- bile phone subscribers in the country.“
India added 18.98 million subscribers in October, taking the total to 742.12 million, according to the telecom regulator.
Retail vendors of phone connections are likely to be provided biometric reading devices that could directly send an appli- cant's UID number and biometric data to the Aadhaar central database for online authentication.
Such devices cost around 10,000, but large-scale use could reduce their prices and make them affordable even for small retailers.
“The cost savings from man power, and time among other resources would be immense,“ said an executive at telecom company Bharti Airtel Ltd, asking not to be identified.
The UID authority plans to issue UIDs to around 600 million people by 2014 by collecting basic demographic data and biometric information such as fingerprints and iris scans. By March 2011, around 100 million Indians will have UID, if the authority meets its targets.
Neel Ratan, executive director of consultancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers Pvt. Ltd, said the security benefits of the move are moderate at this stage. “But it is important to build a critical mass so that the end- user can be traced,“ he said. “The more ubiquitous UID becomes, the stronger it will be.“
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