Soon, Aadhaar-driving license linking will become mandatory: Details here
On Sunday, Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad announced that the government would soon make it mandatory to link Aadhaar with driving licenses. Explaining the move, the minister for Law, Electronics and Information Technology said that it would help cut down driving license duplication and would prevent offenders from escaping scot free. Here are the details.
The announcement came at the 106th Indian Science Congress
The announcement came while Prasad was delivering the presidential address at the 106th Indian Science Congress at Lovely Professional University in Phagwara. Prasad explained that currently, offenders who cause accidents often flee the spot, get a duplicate license issued, and goes scot-free. If driving licenses are linked to Aadhaar, these incidents would be almost eliminated.
How Aadhaar-linking would prevent license duplication
Once a law is passed making Aadhaar-driving license linking mandatory, it will become impossible to issue duplicate driving licenses. Since Aadhaar is linked to a user's biometric data, any user applying for a duplicate license will be be flagged. The system will then issue a warning that the applicant already has a driving license, and hence should not be issued a new one.
Throwback: Key highlights of the Supreme Court's Aadhaar verdict
In its verdict on the constitutional validity of Aadhaar, the Supreme Court, on September 26, ruled that Aadhaar-linking was not necessary for obtaining SIM cards, opening bank accounts, and that no private company could ask for Aadhaar data. However, Aadhaar-linking was kept mandatory for PAN.
Other highlights from Prasad's speech
Having made the announcement, Prasad moved on to other things. Prasad heaped praise on the Center's 'Digital India' initiative, saying that it had helped bridge the rural-urban divide in India. The minister also presented a digital profile of present day India, and observed that there were 123 crore Aadhaar cards, 121 crore mobile phones, 56 crore internet users, and 44.6 crore smartphones in India.
Prasad highlighted the e-commerce, digital transactions boom in India
Prasad added that India had seen a 51% growth in e-commerce, while digital transactions had boomed to Rs. 2,070cr in 2017-18.
