Nilekani happy at Aadhaar progress

DCB Bank opens Aadhaar-enabled, cardless ATM in Bengaluru

Bengaluru, June13: Former chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) Nandan Nilekani on Monday said his dream project is progressing well to achieve the goals for which the body was set up by the UPA gover nment a few years ago.

“We have already seen one billion Aadhaar numbers in the country and 100 million authentications are taking place every day using Aadhaar numbers,” he said.

Speaking after inaugurating an Aadhar-enabled ATM opened by DCB Bank, he said the Aadhaar project has been designed for many use cases other than banking applications. Today, the government is using it for attendance of its employees. The entire public distribution system in Andhra Pradesh is Aadhaar-enabled. Any ration card holder can now buy rice at any of the 29,000 PDS shops across the state because of the portability of Aadhaarenabled PDS system, Nilekani said.

Lauding the efforts of DCB Bank for introducing fingerprint authentication system for withdrawing cash at its ATMs, Nilekani said banks can now use the iris identification system along with fingerprints to authenticate banking transactions. Already, mobile devices maker Samsung has introduced tablet with iris recognition software and within a year, smart phones will come to the market with the iris recognition software, he predicted.

DCB Bank on Monday launched its cardless ATM in Bengaluru, which is enabled by one's Aadhaar number and Aadhaar fingerprint (biometric) instead of the regular method of using debit card and PIN to dispense cash.

“DCB Bank is the only commercial bank to have launched Aadhaar-enabled ATM in the country. In April this year, we had launched first such ATM on a pilot basis in Mumbai...” Murali M Natarajan, managing director & chief executive officer, DCB Bank, said.