Six lakh duplicate Aadhaars cancelled as 'face' added for biometric verification: MeitY

Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar.

The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has cancelled 598,999 duplicate Aadhaars, Minister of State in Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar said in Parliament on July 20.

While replying to a query on Aadhaar in the Lok Sabha, Chandrasekhar explained the steps taken by UIDAI to address the duplicate Aadhaar generation issue and said that "face" has been added as a verification feature.

"The demographic matching mechanism has been further strengthened, biometric matching of all new enrollments is ensured and 'face' has been included as a new modality (in addition to fingerprint and iris) for de-duplication," the minister said.

Apart from de-duplication, facial recognition in Aadhaar is also being used for authenticating pension verification details. Over 100,000 pensioners have been authenticated by this technology as of now.

While responding to another such query in the Lok Sabha on illegal websites promising services related to Aadhaar, Chandrasekhar said that UIDAI has served notices to the websites concerned.

"UIDAI has served notices to the owners of the websites concerned to restrain themselves from providing such unauthorised services by any means, and also to hosting service providers to block defiant websites with immediate effect," Chandrasekhar noted.

Since January 2022, as many as 11 websites have been stopped from offering such services, he added.

"These websites do not have rights to enrol a resident and modify biometric information or link the mobile number of the resident in existing Aadhaar," he said.