UIDAI to set up Aadhaar Seva Kendras on lines of Passport Seva Kendra

The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) is set to come up with Aadhaar Seva Kendras to facilitate enrolment and update services of Aadhaar. The Aadhaar Seva Kendras will be based on the lines of Passport Seva Kendras.

This comes just months after the Supreme Court, in a historic verdict, endorsed the Constitutional validity of Aadhaar cards. A five-judge Bench, headed by then Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra, had ruled that while Aadhaar was in sync with the provisions of the Constitution, the same was not mandatory for banking, mobile phone services, school admissions etc.

It is, however, mandatory to link Aadhaar with PAN. The top court also ruled that no private company could seek Aadhaar data of a citizen.

The verdict was welcomed by the UIDAI, which asserted that Aadhaar was not for state surveillance. According to the UIDAI, profiling of any citizen is not possible using the minimal data that Aadhaar has.

“It has been established by the judgement that Aadhaar is not for the state surveillance as profiling is not possible using the minimal data that Aadhaar has. There are sufficient safeguards to disallow any abuse,” said the UIDAI while reacting to the top court verdict.

The Passport Seva Kendras, on the lines of which the Aadhaar Seva Kendras would be set up, are one-stop centres for anyone seeking a new passport or renewal of an old one. A person can book an appointment online and visit the centres on prescribed date and time with valid documents.

Once the documents are verified and approved by officials, the process to issue passports begin. The government had last year announced 149 new post office passport kendras as well. The government reportedly planned to have a Passport Seva Kendra every 50 km.

External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj had said that the NDA government had opened altogether 251 PSKs and POPSKs since it came to power in May 2014.