Have an Aadhaar get an instant mobile activation

Instant activation of your mobile phone would soon be a possibility if you have an Aadhaar number. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has asked the telecom ministry to work with the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) on making this a reality as 'soon as possible'.

Updated on: Sep 26, 2014, 01:33:35 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Instant activation of your mobile phone would soon be a possibility if you have an Aadhaar number. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has asked the telecom ministry to work with the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) on making this a reality as “soon as possible”.

The objective of the Aadhaar linked activation of mobile phones is twin --- to check identity theft to get a sim card and track the number of sims a person has --- apart from providing better service to consumers.

As of now, activation of a mobile connection can take up to a day and other services about six hours. And the telecom consumer service rules provide that a person cannot have more than nine sim cards.

According to government sources, there are high number of cases of use of someone else’s identity papers been used to provide a sim card to an unauthorised person. As a result, the service providers cannot track the number of sim cards a person seeking a new connection has.

The telecom service providers have expressed their inability to verify credentials of each sim card buyer prompting the government to look at Aadhaar as an option to prevent identity theft.

The officials said the telecom companies were willing to install biometric readers with their vendors to provide online authentication of a person having an Aadhaar number. The UIDAI has developed authentication software that confirms a person’s identity on basis of his or her biometric details in less than a minute.

“The software will tell the vendor whether the person seeking mobile services has presented his correct identity. The confirmation and the Aadhaar number obtained through biometric authentication can be used by the service provider for instant activation of the mobile services,” a government official said.

The government sources said the issue was discussed at the September 6 meeting with PM Modi and he asked the Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad to work on it. The government sources said the UIDAI and the telecom ministry have worked on the suggestion and the instruction in this regard is expected soon.

The UIDAI has already generated 680 million Aadhaar numbers and has over 90% coverage in major cities like Delhi, which have a very high mobile usage. The officials said the initiative will give a push for Aadhaar enrollment in rural areas which had been lagging as compared to urban India.

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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