Ghaziabad: Aadhaar Seva Kendra inaugurated by Rajeev Chandrasekhar, General VK Singh (Retd)

Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Minister of State for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship and Electronics and Information Technology and General (Dr) VK Singh (Retd), Minister of State for Road Transport and Highways and Civil Aviation jointly inaugurated the 5th Aadhaar Seva Kendra (ASK) in UP at Ghaziabad, on Sunday.

As per an official release issued by the Ministry of Electronics and IT, the ASK has a capacity to handle requests from 1000 residents per day. On the occasion, Rajeev Chandrasekhar congratulated everyone and said that this public facility is dedicated purely to the residents of Ghaziabad.

He spoke about the vision of Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Digital India which lays out three broad outcomes for Technology to achieve in a developing country like India. These are technology to transform the lives of citizens, expand economic opportunities and create strategic capabilities in certain technologies.

Chandrasekhar highlighted the achievements of the digital India campaign over the last six years and remarked that 100 paise released from the Centre towards the welfare of poor and needy, now reach into their accounts at the click of a button.

Minister of State for Electronics also cited the example of an indigenously developed CoWIN platform that has facilitated vaccination of over 100 crore people in India and is now the most sought after platform among various counties for managing their vaccination programme.

He credited the success of this transformation to the vision of the Prime Minister towards the use of technology for Direct benefit transfer by making use of the Aadhaar that has plugged all leakages from the system and prevented corruption.

"Around 313 central government schemes have been notified to use Aadhaar for leak-proof delivery of various social welfare benefits like PM-KISAN, PM Aawaas Yojana, PM Jan Arogya Yojana, PAHAL, MGNREGA, National Social Security Assistance Programme, PDS (in-kind benefits through Aadhaar authentication) etc," Chandrasekhar said.

He later added that the savings made to the public exchequer owing to the use of Aadhaar and DBT, primarily due to weeding out of fake and duplicate beneficiaries, have been estimated to be to the tune of Rupees 1.78 lakh crores as of March 2020; as per DBT Mission, Cabinet Secretariat.

Speaking on the occasion General (Dr) VK Singh (Retd) thanked the government for starting the ASK in Ghaziabad.

"The Centre will make Aadhaar related services for residents easy. Now people can update their Aadhaar and also enrol for Aadhaar at the centre," he said.

Saurav Garg, CEO UIDAI said that UIDAI plans to operate 166 ASKs in 122 cities throughout India. So far establishment of 58 ASKs completed and started functioning.

He emphasized that UIDAI is moving forward by making Aadhaar services easier for citizens.

"In this direction, we are focusing on online Aadhaar updation services where residents can update their Aadhaar using the mobile app and also by visiting the self-service update portal of UIDAI," he added.

Deputy Director-General UIDAI, Regional Office Lucknow, Prasant Kumar Singh said that new ASKs are also planned for Gorakhpur, Kanpur and Greater Noida and are likely to be completed during the current financial year itself.

Speaking on the occasion Nitish Sinha, ADG, UIDAI RO Lucknow said that "this is the 5th Aadhaar Seva Kendra in UP after Agra, Lucknow, Prayagraj and Meerut."

He further said that the dry run has started in ASKs at Gonda and Varanasi and very soon the dry run will start at Moradabad and Saharanpur.

UP has achieved an Aadhaar saturation level of 90.66 per cent with respect to the projected population of 2021, according to the release.

"To provide Aadhaar related services, 10,400+ Aadhaar kits are functional in UP (which includes 2700+ CSC BCs and 3000+ IPPB CELC Kits," it said.

These kits have carried approximately 5.17 Lakhs new Aadhaar enrolment and 22 Lakhs updates during the last month.

In the Ghaziabad district itself, 145 Aadhaar kits are functional (which includes 21 CSC BCs and 38 IPPB CELC Kits). These kits have carried approximately 9 thousand new Aadhaar enrolments and 33 thousand updates during the last month.

( With inputs from ANI )

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