Soon, make payments with your Aadhaar number without linking it to a bank

Your 12-digit Aadhaar number could soon be your single point payment address for sending and receiving money without needing to link it to a bank account, once the IndiaPost payments bank becomes operational in September, reported The Economic Times on Tuesday. 

Quoting IndiaPost CEO AP Singh, the report said that Aadhaar is not a payment address by itself at present, but that will change once IndiaPost's payments bank comes online. The bank hopes to cover at least 650 districts of the country in the initial stage. 

"We will bring out a solution to make Aadhaar a payment address, which will work with or without a bank account. That means that people who already have an Aadhaar should be able to receive payment from any source," Singh told the financial daily.

The report added that the Unique Identification Authority of India had already run a pilot programme to test the model. The pilot run involved five banks, including the State Bank of India. 

The move comes at a time when the government is planning to make all ration shops under the



public distribution system in the country Aadhaar-enabled by June 30 this year.

"We will make all 5.58 lakh ration shops Aadhar-enabled by June 30. We are in discussion with Food and Consumer Affairs Ministry for this," IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad had said. (Read more)

While IndiaPost aims to allow users to use their Aadhaar number for conducting transactions irrespective of whether they have linked it a bank account, Aadhaar-enabled payments have also taken off with banks. 

Further, in January this year, the ministry of electronics and information technology said that 119 banks had been connected with the Aadhaar-enabled payments system and 338.7 million transactions had taken place.

According to reports, since demonetisation, 83.9 million Aadhaar-enabled payments system transactions have taken place as of mid-January, of which 37.3 million were in December and 20.6 million in the first 15 days of January.

There were 25.7 million and 26.9 million Aadhaar-enabled payment system transactions in October and November, respectively.