So what if UIDAI didn’t get Rs15,000 crore!

Casting away doubts over the future of the Aadhar project, Nandan Nilekani on Thursday said his organisation has enough funds to complete the initial target of providing 200 million Aadhar cards in the country.

The ministry of finance has rejected the demand of Unique Identity Authority for a corpus of Rs15,000 crore to provide Aadhar cards with high quality biometrics data including iris.

“The initial target was of 200 million and we will be able to complete it on time. The finance ministry has assured us full support and the Rs15,000 crore fund that we had asked for was for covering the whole population of the country. Now that decision would be taken by the cabinet,” said Nandan Nilekani, chairman, UIDAI.

The Planning Commission has raised objection over the duplication of the data collected by the National Population Registrar and the UAIDI. In a letter to the finance ministry the Planning Commission had said due to duplication of the data the Comptroller & Auditor General of India (CAG) might raise questions over the wastage of funds between the two authorities. After which the ministry of finance decided to cancel the allocation of Rs15,000 crore to UIDAI. It has a corpus of around Rs3,000 crore.

Nilekani also said that the Aadhar card would be enough for people to get a bank account and no other document will be needed.

The statement was given in a response to Wednesday’s notification issued by the RBI.

The notification said that “It is reiterated that while opening accounts based on Aadhaar also, banks must satisfy themselves about the current address of the customer by obtaining required proof of the same”.