Finance ministry plans fingerprint-based ATMs

Your fingerprint or eye scan may soon be enough to withdraw cash from ATMs. For that, you will require a biometric based Aadhaar number. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Jan 21, 2013, 01:46:50 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Your fingerprint or eye scan may soon be enough to withdraw cash from ATMs. For that, you will require a biometric based Aadhaar number.

In a bid to encourage higher enrollment for unique identification or Aadhaar number, the finance ministry has asked all public sector and rural banks to speed up setting up of biometric cash dispensers.

Unlike the conventional ATMs, where you have to key in your pin number for a debit card, one's fingerprint logs him or her into the bank account. "It is after an online authentication of the finger print from a UIDAI centre," a senior government official said. Once that is done, a person can perform banking transactions like in any other ATMs.

At the first go, the banks have been asked to set up biometric money machines in rural and semi-rural areas, where penetration of banking services is low and online facilities are available.

The move is aimed at making people enroll for Aadhaar numbers, which is very low even in 20 pilot districts where the direct benefit transfer was implemented from January 1, 2013. The ministry has already announced its plan to extend the transfer of benefits directly into bank accounts of people in 43 districts by March.

The dispensing machines to be operated and managed by private players would also help in reducing the burden on banks, where number of accounts would increase manifold because of the direct benefit scheme.

In addition to this, the government has also asked the banks to seek Aadhaar numbers of its customers in a bid to link their account numbers with the number. This, in future, will not only help in transferring money from the government directly into bank accounts using Aadhaar platform, but will have help the government to track people's financial transactions.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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