The Life Insurance Corporation of India on Friday said it will remove the mandatory requirement of providing Aadhaar number for customers to access their policy pages, saying it was “inadvertently done”.
The move comes after The Hindu on Thursday pointed out how the insurance company was forcing people to update their Aadhaar number and PAN on its login page to access their policy pages and other details.
Replying to an email sent to the Chairman on Thursday, the executive director corporate communications, LIC, said the earlier website was available without requesting the Aadhaar number.
New portal
“Subsequent to the migration to a new portal, the LIC has planned to extend the range of facilities offered to our customers online,” the executive director said.
“Keeping in mind that data security and privacy are of paramount importance and also abiding by the regulator’s directives, we have sought additional information from the customer to establish his online credentials. In the process, seeking of Aadhaar number, PAN details mandatorily was inadvertently done,” the official said. The official added that the issue had been escalated to their technical team and “we will be removing the requirements of the mandatory providing of Aadhaar number and PAN”. However, the official did not specify a date by which this would be done.
The mandatory requirements on the site acted like a firewall preventing access to a customer’s policy pages if he/she didn’t provide the Aadhaar number and PAN details. Legal experts feel that the move is in violation of the Supreme Court interim order extending the deadline of customers providing Aadhaar number for services to March 31.
Many customers had raised objections regarding this move of LIC on Twitter.
