After making Aadhaar compulsory for filing income tax returns and applying for PAN, the government has announced that Aadhaar mandatory for mobile phone connections, following an order of the Supreme Court last month. The Department of Telecom has announced that all telecom operators will have re-verify all existing mobile subscribers (prepaid and postpaid) through Aadhaar based E-KYC process within a year.
It said that this is an effective process to ensure identity verification, as well as the addresses of all mobile phone subscribers. DoT said that operators should intimate their existing subscribers through advertisement as well as SMS about the re-verification and should upload the complete details of this activity on their website.
For re-verification through Aadhaar based E-KYC process, operators will
send a ‘Verification Code’ to the mobile number of the subscriber. Before initiating the E-KYC process, the operators will verify the ‘Verification Code’ from the subscriber to confirm that the SIM card of mobile connection is physically available with the subscriber.
After completion of E-KYC process, before updating or overwriting the old subscriber detail in database with data received through E-KYC process, operators should seek confirmation from subscriber about the re-verification of his/her mobile number after 24 Hours through SMS. If the subscriber does not respond within 3 daylight hours to SMS, the operator will treat re-verification as positive and overwrite the subscriber
database by E-KYC process data.
“For issuing additional mobile connection to a re-verified subscriber, operators need to follow separate E-KYC process. However, verification of a subscriber is not required in prepaid to postpaid conversion or vice-versa,” said DoT.