Inquiries by the Aadhaar body revealed that when customers went to banks to link their Aadhaar number with their accounts, the banks also passed on the Aadhaar-linked bank account details to the government's central database of Aadhaar-linked bank accounts for transferring subsidies under various schemes.
Hoping to clamp down on the possible misuse of the rule to link Aadhaar to bank accounts, UIDAI, the agency that governs Aadhaar, has ordered banks to get explicit consent from every customer before they swap the bank account in which cooking gas subsidy and other benefits were deposited by the government.
The directive comes weeks after multiple complaints from people that they had stopped receiving cooking gas subsidies in their specified bank account after they linked their Aadhaar number to a second bank account or an Airtel mobile number.
Inquiries by the Aadhaar body revealed that when customers went to banks to link their Aadhaar number to their accounts, the banks also passed on details of the Aadhaar-linked bank account to the government's central database of bank accounts for transferring subsidies under various schemes.
The system had been designed in a way that the central database would replace the old bank account with the new. "So if a person was getting his cooking gas subsidy in one bank account and went to update a different bank account, he would get the subsidy in the account linked with Aadhaar last," a government official explained.
Except that the customer did not know that he had 'requested' for updating his account details for government subsidy.
But this wasn't a technical glitch. Many banks, the official said, used this design to shore up deposits.
The directive comes weeks after multiple complaints from people that they had stopped receiving cooking gas subsidies in their specified bank account after they linked their Aadhaar number to a second bank account or an Airtel mobile number.
Inquiries by the Aadhaar body revealed that when customers went to banks to link their Aadhaar number to their accounts, the banks also passed on details of the Aadhaar-linked bank account to the government's central database of bank accounts for transferring subsidies under various schemes.
The system had been designed in a way that the central database would replace the old bank account with the new. "So if a person was getting his cooking gas subsidy in one bank account and went to update a different bank account, he would get the subsidy in the account linked with Aadhaar last," a government official explained.
Except that the customer did not know that he had 'requested' for updating his account details for government subsidy.
But this wasn't a technical glitch. Many banks, the official said, used this design to shore up deposits.
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