In six months, Andhra Pradesh government to do away with all certificates

Ruling out privacy breach and security issues, the state government has started giving access to the State Resident Data Hub — built on the Aadhar data ecosystem — to various entities like banks. The sanctioning authorities at village and mandal levels of each department will have access to the data of residents of AP, except biometric.

IT adviser to AP government J. Satyanarayana said, “We are hoping that in the next six months we will stabilising the Hub and most of the linkage, authentication will be done. As part of certificate-less governance, the revenue department has already done away with routine certificates. If any department or person needs a certificate they can simple send a query to the data hub.”

Brushing aside doubts on data leakage, he said that no bulk data would be available to end-users. “They can only access by typing a particular number or name and get the details. For instance, the sanctioning authority of pension scheme, fertiliser subsidy can access the data to know the eligibility of an applicant.”

He further added, “The public data available with various departments can be accessed by anyone and it depends on each department to share it. We don’t have biometric data with us. Even the Smart Pulse survey will not collect biometric data.”

Principal secretary (revenue) J.C. Sharma said, “The public should not suffer wherein they have to produce routine certificates again and again. Regarding land documents, we have given access to all bankers to Webland. Even then we are receiving queries we are going to tell the bankers to access the data to know the details of the land of the loan applicant. All routine certificates will be stopped. So the public need not approach MeeSeva for certificates.”

UIDAI deputy director M.V.S. Ram Reddy said, “We have shared only basic information like Aadhaar number, address, photograph, gender and age. No biometric data, like fingerprints and IRIS scans, is shared with them. States approach us for validation case by case. We receive around one crore requests from the AP government and 60-70 lakh from TS every month. The question of identity theft will not arise.” The Centre had funded Rs 10 crore for the hubs.