Over 500,000 Million Mobiles With Aadhaar KYC May Be Disconnected

It is likely that there is a new KYC trouble for over 500,000 million cellphone connections, aka nearly half of the phone population in India. If the SIM cards obtained based on Aadhaar verification are not supported with fresh identification, they may be disconnected.

The issue has been noticed due to the judgement of Supreme Court towards Aadhaar in which private companies are prevented from making use of a person’s unique ID for authentication.

The government is now discussing the issue at the highest level, regarding the fact that citizens may suffer from the large-scale impact in case of disconnection of vast number of phones. It was stated by officials that the government will provide enough time to freshen KYC.

On Wednesday, Aruna Sundararajan, telecom secretary, met cellphone companies to discuss an alternative and a solution. The telecom department is also discussing the matter with India Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI).

TOI was told by Sundararajan that the government is highly concerned about the issue and they are working on a way out as soon as possible. She emphasized the government’s wish to guarantee that the transition would not cause any inconvenience to customers. She noted that they want to make sure the transition is smooth which causes subscribers little troubles.

The majority of connections procured through Aadhaar comes from Reliance Jio stable, the newest to enter the mobile business whose operation started in September 2016 by onboarding customers via the biometric route only. (on Wednesday, Jio announced that at the end of September this year the business had over 250,000 million subscribers)

Besides Jio, most of all the other phone companies had a similar number of subscribers (that were provided with SIM cards based on Aadhaar authentication only), including Vodafone-Idea, state-owned MTNL and BSNL as well as Bharti Airtel.

In addition, because their previous paper documents on pre-Aadhaar KYC might have been destroyed, by telecom companies, millions of older subscribers are left with solely digital Aadhaar identification too. As the documents were made digital by linkage with Aadhaar, the government allowed older documents to be destroyed freely in March last year.

Mobile companies indicate they are waiting for the telecom department to issue a direction. One of the companies’ top officials stated that they still don’t know clearly what to do next, and that UIDAI had asked them to file an “exit plan” before October 15. Nevertheless, pointed out by the official, only when they get the telecom ministry’s instructions that there will be a final direction on the issue.

Sources revealed that to address the issue, customers may have to file new document for identification as a stage in KYC process. The document can be a driving license, electricity bill, passport, PAN card or gas bill.

It is expected that the telecom department would issue an order on the issue to mobile companies very soon.