Fifteen crore Aadhar cards linked with bank accounts

Current focus is on linking the bank accounts of 17 crore DBTL beneficiaries of Aadhar numbers by June 30 this year, says NPCI MD & CEO

The National Payments Corporation of India on Friday announced linking of 15 crore Aadhar cards with various bank accounts in India.

"NPCI, the umbrella organization for all retail payments system in India, reached a major milestone of successfully linking 15 crore bank accounts with Aadhar number," NPCI Managing Director and CEO A.P. Hota said here.

The current focus is on linking the bank accounts of 17 crore DBTL beneficiaries of Aadhar numbers by June 30 this year, he added.

"It is expected that soon all beneficiaries of all types of government subsidiaries and benefit transfers will be brought under the linkage programme. Such a framework of electronic benefit transfer would not only be unique, but will be one of the largest in the world," Hota said.

He said the extent of leakage prevented due to this unique system would be visible on completion of running the scheme for about a year.

In April 2009, the NPCI was set up with the core objective of consolidating and integrating the multiple payment systems into a nationwide, uniform and standard business process for all retail payment systems for facilitating an affordable payment mechanism to achieve financial inclusion.

Since then, NPCI has completed several payment system projects including ATM switching, mobile payments, cheque truncation system, PoS switching, 24x7 remittance system called IMPS, RuPay and the Aadhar-based payments.