AP to become first Aadhaar-enabled state soon: Nilekani

63 mn people in state get Aadhaar numbers

Andhra Pradesh is soon going to become the first state to make the unique identity number 'Aadhaar' universal covering its entire population of 84.6 million people.

“Within the next four months we are going to make Andhra universal in terms of Aadhaar enrolment. We also want to show the world how an entire state can run its public delivery using Aadhaar,” said Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) chairman Nandan Nilekani on Friday.

In Andhra Pradesh about 80 million people have been enrolled and of this, 63 million have already been issued Aadhaar numbers, according to Nilekani.

“Very importantly, they (the state government) are seeing how they can use Aadhaar to make the delivery mode more beneficial and more convenient for the citizens of Andhra Pradesh,” he said after meeting chief minister N Kiran Kumar Reddy here on the implementation of unique identity programme earlier in the day.

The state government is looking at bringing all the welfare schemes, including scholarships, pensions, national rural employment guarantee programme and the public distribution system (PDS), onto the Aadhaar platform, according to Nilekani.

Stating that the UIDAI would also go all out to ensure early completion of the process of enrolment and issuance of Aadhaar numbers, he said they would now go by Pin Code to locate uncovered population and deploy enrolment teams accordingly.

In today’s meeting, Nilekani and the chief minister also discussed ways to roll out more business correspondents across the state so that the beneficiaries get their money easily.

Across the country, about 450 million people have been enrolled for Aadhaar of which about 370 million have already received their Aadhaar numbers. Efforts would be made to clear the backlog, he said.

“By 2014, we would have done 600 million enrolments or one out of two residents of India. We have 200 million a year Aadhaar generation capacity,” he said.