MasterCard Worldwide, a leading global payments company, today said it has developed a payment solution for ‘Aadhaar’. ‘Aadhaar’ is a 12-digit Unique Identification Number (UID) that captures basic demographic and Biometric information of Indian residents. The UID will make it possible for residents to establish their identity with financial institutions thereby providing them a gateway into the formal banking system. This payment solution will enable Aadhaar holders to perform payment...
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Aadhaar leading a surge in bank accounts: Nilekani
The Unique Identification Authority of India is already seeing a massive explosion for bank accounts among people enrolling for Aadhaar or the unique IDs issued by the authority, its chairman Nandan Nilekani said. Some 80% of people enrolling for the IDs want bank accounts, he said at a lecture here organised by the Indian Institute of Banking & Finance on Thursday. “If we are able to provide every such person with...
More »Increasing cases of irregularities in MGNREGS
The Ministry received 153 complaints of irregularities in the implementation of MGNREGA up to 2007-08; 645 complaints in 2008-09; 528 complaints in 2009-10 and 272 complaints in 2010-11 so far. With a view to make the scheme more accountable, the following steps have been taken by the Ministry:(i) States have been asked to deploy adequate number of dedicated staff with the implementing authorities. Administrative expenses, out of which salary of such...
More »Right to privacy or the right to do business with UID database?
Industrialist Ratan Tata has the capacity to challenge a breach of his privacy in the Supreme Court. But what about the nearly 60 crore Indian residents who don’t know what will become of the biometric data being collected by UIDAI? The leak of the Niira Radia tapes in India and thousands of US classified documents on WikiLeaks, has stirred up again the debate on privacy. Earlier this week, Tata group chairman...
More »Unique facility, or recipe for trouble? by Jean Drèze
It is quite likely that a few weeks from now someone will be knocking at your doors and asking for your fingerprints. If you agree, your fingerprints will enter a national database, along with personal characteristics (age, sex, occupation, and so on) that have already been collected from you, unless you were missed in the “Census household listing” earlier this year. The purpose of this exercise is to build the National...
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