The government will soon make linking of Aadhaar card with driving licence mandatory. Union Minister of Law, Electronics and Information Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad shared the development at the 106th Indian Science Congress at Lovely Professional University in Punjab.
"We are soon going to bring a law which will make it mandatory to link Aadhaar with driving licence," Prasad said, reported PTI.
According to the minister, this will restrain people from getting a duplicate licence after road accidents. Since Aadhaar is linked to a person's biometric and iris data, it will help the system to understand whether they are already registered under a valid driving licence or not.
"At present, what happens is that the guilty person who causes an accident flees the scene and gets a duplicate licence. This helps him go scot-free," Prasad said.
This ordinance will help the government to control the issue of fake licence. It will also help to track all the violations that a driving licence holder will obtain on breaking rules and to issue the needed legal action, including fines.
The minister also praised the government's Digital India move and said that it has helped the country to successfully bridge its urban-rural divide.
He said that there are 123 crore Aadhaar cards, 121 crore mobile phones, 44.6 crore smartphones and 56 crore internet users. Online payment transactions in India have increased to over Rs 2,070 crore in the year 2017-18, with a 51 per cent growth in the e-commerce sector.
On September 26, 2018, the Supreme Court had struck down various provisions of the Aadhaar Act by ruling that Aadhaar-linking was not mandatory for opening bank accounts, obtaining SIM cards and no private company could ask for Aadhaar data.
(With PTI inputs)
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