BENGALURU: Close to 350 million people in the country are still without access to mobile phones, Aadhaar-based transactions are the way forward to include them in the digital economy, said Nandan Nilekani, former chairman, Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), here on Friday.
Though there are a billion phones in the country, only 600 million citizens in the country own them. Of the 600 million, 250 million are smartphones and 350 million devices are feature phones.
For the remaining 350 million adults in the country, Aadhaar number can be used as bank accounts.
“There is no other country in the world where there is a payment system which is done from phones, which is inter-operable between smartphones and feature phones. Through the BHIM app, one can send money to an Aadhaar number. Therefore, Aadhaar becomes a connection between people who have phones and people who don’t have them,” he said.
Though the infrastructure at the consumer-end is ready, issues such as transaction cost for digital transactions should be sorted out, he said. Moreover, the number of Point of Sale machines too should be scaled up, he said.