Aadhaar number is used by three crore people on a daily basis as on July 10 this year, said J. Satyanarayana, Chairman of Unique Identification Authority of India, here on Wednesday. The UIDAI Chairman was speaking at the three-day Digital Identity Research Initiative (DIRI) international conference organised in Hyderabad.
Mr. Satyanarayana said nine crore people use Aadhaar for various benefits per month. A total of 121.7 crore people were already enrolled under Aadhaar, he added. This means, over 99% of the country’s adult population is Aadhaar-registered and 90% of adult and child population has Aadhaar. Moreover, over a lakh enrolments were being done every day, he said.
Several States have become Aadhaar-efficient and on July 18, the UIADI would inaugurate a service in Andhra Pradesh by which users can access any government benefit on the State’s Aadhaar platform, he announced.
The government’s savings as on March this year, thanks to Aadhaar usage, was ₹90,012 crore, he pointed out. “We spent only ₹10,000 crore on Aadhaar and the returns are manifold when compared to the investment,” Mr. Satyanarayana said, adding that the figure indicates only direct savings in public sector. “If enhancement in efficiency is computed in public and private sector, the number will be much higher,” he said. The savings of ₹90,012 crore is computed only from petroleum and natural gas, food and public distribution, rural development and other sectors, he said during the inaugural session of the conference held at Indian School of Business.
Security concerns
The Aadhaar Act has made data secure, Mr. Satyanarayana said. “Aadhaar is covered by strong end-to-end 2048-bit encryption. Every device, person and software is registered and authenticated before allowing enrolment,” he said.
At two data centres with 7,000 servers, the data is secure and each of the centres has security policy. “Even if this data is stolen, nothing will happen as it is heavily encrypted. Decryption of this data will take 7,000 years,” Mr. Satyanarayana said. Only Registered Device Systems that are pretested can interact with Aadhaar system, he added. “I assure people that their data will not be used by those who are not registered with the UIDAI.”
In the coming days, the conference would debate cyber security and Aadhaar and privacy among others.
