Budget 2018: Govt mulls Aadhaar like unique identity for every enterprise

The government will evolve a scheme to provide a unique identity to every enterprise in India on the lines of Aadhaar, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said on Thursday.

"Aadhaar has provided an identity to every Indian. Aadhaar has eased the delivery of so many public services to our people," Jaitley said while presenting the Union Budget 2018-19 in the Lok Sabha.

Noting that every enterprise, be it large or small, also "needs a unique ID", Jaitley said the government will evolve "a scheme to assign every individual enterprise in India a unique ID".

As many as 119 crore biometric identifier have been issued to individuals so far, and Aadhaar is required as an identity proof of residents by various government and non- government entities.

For instance, the government has made it mandatory for verifying bank accounts and PANs, to weed out black money and bring unaccounted wealth to book. The same for cellphone SIMs has been mandated to establish the identity of mobile phone users.

The UIDAI recently announced a new concept of Virtual ID which Aadhaar-card holder can generate from its website and give for various purposes, including SIM verification, instead of sharing the actual 12-digit biometric ID.

The soon-to-be-introduced Virtual ID, a random 16-digit number, will give the users the option of not sharing their Aadhaar number at the time of authentication.

Aadhaar has also announced that it will soon include face recognition alongside iris or fingerprint scan as a means of verifying the users, helping those who face issues in biometric authentication or have worn-out fingerprints.