UIDAI organises workshop on recent initiatives for simplifying Aadhaar usage

HT Bureau
GUWAHATI, Aug 22: As part of effort to promote Aadhaar usage by states, Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), Regional Office (RO) Guwahati organised a state level workshop on ‘Recent Initiatives for Simplifying Aadhaar Usage’ in Guwahati, Assam on Monday.
The workshop was chaired by Dr M Ariz Ahammed, IAS, principal secretary, Government of Assam. While addressing the participants/officials, he highlighted that the gap between what governance should be and what governance is at the field should be reduced. He stated that Aadhaar was instrumental in delivering benefits without any bias of religion, caste, class or gender thereby instilling equality and development for all.
Kapil Jambhulkar, director, UIDAI, RO Guwahati delivered a welcome address and a brief presentation on the journey of Aadhaar in the four states of Assam, Meghalaya, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh.
Senior officers from State Government of Assam, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh and Sikkim attended the workshop and representatives from these four states gave a detailed presentation on progress of Aadhaar enrolment and initiatives taken to implement DBT and Aadhaar authentication system for providing benefits to the beneficiaries after their successful biometric authentication. Best practices adopted by the states were also explained.
Speaking on the occasion, Devajit Khound, DDG UIDAI, RO Guwahati explained how Aadhaar has become the core of India’s digital public infrastructure. Aadhaar with its inherent features of uniqueness, authentication, financial address and e-KYC has helped the Government authorities to directly reach residents for delivery of various subsidies, benefits and services. He emphasised that Aadhaar is verifiable anytime, anywhere both online as well as off-line in a cost-effective way.
In his speech, he emphasised on the use of Aadhaar in every social welfare scheme to bring transparency/visibility in the existing system and urged the State Government that benefits shall be provided to the beneficiaries through Aadhaar Enabled Payment System for last mile delivery.
All the sessions of the workshop deliberated on Aadhaar features, key developments on usage of Aadhaar, data privacy and information security.
Senior officials from DBT Mission discussed the various identified Central Government schemes under DBT and its implementation procedures for the State Government.
Officials from UIDAI HQ discussed and highlighted the importance of DBT and the issuance of Section-7 Gazetted notifications for the schemes and benefits disbursed from the State Consolidated Fund. Discussions pertaining to Section 4(4)(b)(ii) were also held for issuance of notification under good governance.
The workshop ended with a positive note and vote of thanks.