The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has permitted Common Service Centres (CSCs) to start Aadhaar updation facility at around 20,000 CSCs. This comes two years after the government had decided not to renew its MoU with CSCs following allegations of corruption and violation of the Aadhaar enrolment process.
The UIDAI has set a deadline of June for CSCs with banking facilities to upgrade their infrastructure and get other necessary approvals, Ministry of Electronics and IT said in a statement. CSCs have only been permitted to update demographic details such as name, address and date of birth, according to the Hindu.
CSC CEO Dinesh Tyagi said he has asked all banking correspondents to “immediately finish technical and other upgradation which the UIDAI has asked for so that Aadhaar updation work can be started soon”. IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said that CSC village level entrepreneurs (VLEs) should start the work “with responsibility” and according to “instructions issued by UIDAI in this regard”.
To make Aadhaar updating easier for citizens, @UIDAI has permitted @CSCegov_ which are designated banking correspondents of banks, to offer #Aadhaar update services. Around 20,000 such CSCs will now be able to offer this service to citizens.
— Ravi Shankar Prasad (@rsprasad) April 27, 2020
There are 3.9 lakh CSCs across the country. CSCs had enrolled over 19 crore people into the Aadhaar program since its launch, but had stopped functioning after UIDAI decided not to renew its MoU with them in February 2018 citing corruption complaints and violation of the enrolment process. In January 2019, Anurag Singh Thakur, who was then heading the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology, had asked IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad to restart Aadhaar services across CSCs. He said the discontinuation of CSCs had caused significant financial difficulty to people in rural areas, especially those that had invested in expensive biometric equipment and manpower to carry out Aadhaar work.
