Home ministry may finally get to collect Aadhaar data
NEW DELHI: The government may entrust the responsibility of collecting biometric data for the 12-digit Aadhaar number to the Registrar General of India (RGI) under the National Population Register (NPR) project, sources told HT.
According to the Union home ministry sources, the government is likely to go back to the original mandate of Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) wherein it was supposed to issue 12-digit numbers only and the responsibility of biometric data collection was with the RGI under the ministry.
Under the NPR project also, biometric data is collected from citizens leading to many instances of duplication of data.
Union home minister Rajnath Singh on Thursday sat with law minister Ravi Shankar Prasad and minister of state for planning Rao Inderjit Singh to sort out issues with regard to the two projects.
After the meeting, Singh said: “Both sides put their respective point of views and now key officials from all three ministries will sit down to iron out differences.”
As HT reported on Thursday, three different ministries —
MHA HAS SUGGESTED THAT THE NPR AND AADHAAR PROJECTS SHOULD BE MERGED UNDER REGISTRAR GENERAL OF INDIA
planning, home and information technology (IT) are planning to move in three different directions on Aadhaar.
The home ministry has already suggested that the NPR and Aadhaar projects should be merged under the RGI or divi- sion of work between the two should be in such a way that enrolment is done entirely by NPR while UIDAI, which runs Aadhaar, carries out de-duplication ahead of generating the unique number.
The IT ministry wants the UIDAI under its charge to use the Aadhaar number for various e-governance projects.
The Nandan Nilekani-led UIDAI was set up in 2009 with a mandate to generate Aadhaar numbers. But it persuaded the UPA government to allow it to enrol biometric details of the residents as well.