Govt’s social security arms differ on Aadhaar seeding
NEW DELHI: Two social security arms of the government have different rules for Aadhaar requirements. While the Employees’ State Insurance Corporation (ESIC) has decided not to deny any benefit to insured persons for want of Aadhaar, the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) has made Aadhaar linking mandatory, citing a law which is yet-to-be fully operational.
The government has received representations from employees and employers that they are unable to conduct online transactions at EPFO because the staterun retirement fund has made Aadhaar mandatory from June 1 on the pretext of the Code on Social Security (COSS), 2020, which is not yet fully operational, four people with direct knowledge of the matter said.
Employers are unable to deposit provident fund contributions of lakhs of employees because of this rule, they said. EPFO is one of the world’s largest social security organisations, which maintains over 220 million accounts with a corpus of ₹12 lakh crore.
“The government has made it amply clear that social security organisations would not make Aadhaar mandatory until the COSS is made fully operational.
At present, only ‘Section 142’ of COSS is notified, which aims to create the National Database of Unorganised Workers and not to create any inconvenience to members of ESIC or EPFO,” said one of the four people who is a government official. Both ESIC and EPFO cater to the organised sector.
A second person, aware of the development at ESIC, said, “The labour ministry specifically clarified last month that the government has only notified Section 142 of COSS. As other provisions of the Code are pending, Aadhaar should not be made mandatory at this stage.”
EPFO, however, issued a circular on June 1 to its field formations making seeding of Aadhaar numbers mandatory for online transactions under Section 142 of the Code, which the government had notified on May 5, 2021.
HT has seen the circular that read: “In compliance of the above provision (Section 142) in EPFO, the Competent Authority has approved that the ECR (electronic challan-cum-return) shall be allowed to be filed only for those members, whose Aadhaar numbers are seeded and verified with the UANS, w.e.f. 01.06.2021.” Through ECR, an employer deposits provident fund contributions of its employees in their respective social security accounts, which are called universal account numbers.
Quoting labour minister Santosh Gangwar, a government statement on May 5 clarified Section 142 has been notified “only for collection of data of workers including migrant workers. No benefit will be denied to workers for want of Aadhaar.”
The labour ministry, EPFO, ESIC and Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) did not respond to email queries on this matter. UIDAI is a statutory authority that issues 12-digit unique identification numbers called Aadhaar.
The ministry on May 12 also advised ESIC that it could go ahead with the collection of Aadhaar data from insured people, but it shall not deny any benefit to any of them.