Centre Proposes Mandatory Linking of Aadhaar With Driving Licence

New Delhi: Reckless drivers on city roads should have reasons to worry as the Centre on Sunday announced the mandatory linking of driving licence with Aadhaar.

The move would not only stop misuse of driving license and issue of duplicate ones but help police nab the accused of an accident who flee the scene and make good the laxity in the system. Incidents of drunken driving could also see a significant decline.

“We are soon going to bring a law which will make it mandatory to link Aadhaar with driving licence,” Union Law, Electronics and Information Technology Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said.

“With the Aadhaar linkage you can change your name but you cannot change your biometrics, neither iris nor fingerprints. So the moment you go in for a duplicate licence, the system will say this person already has a driving licence and should not be given a new one,” said Prasad, explaining the need for the linkage.

He was addressing a gathering at the ongoing Indian Science Congress in Jalandhar.

The Motor Vehicle (Amendment) Bill, currently pending in Parliament also seeks to link Aadhaar with driving license. The Bill seeks to strengthen the legal framework for improving road safety in India, a country which reports 500,000 road accidents each year resulting in about 147,000 fatalities.

Union Road Transport and Highways Minister, Nitin Gadkari, had earlier said that 30 per cent of the driving licenses in the country are fake and bogus and the government was planning to digitise the procedure to obtain the license for driving and also Aadhaar linking to avoid duplication.

According to National Informatics Centre on National Register for Driving Licenses figures, as on January 5, 2015, out of total 6,70,16,851 driving licences records available, 16,72,138 records were found to be possible duplicates spread over 7,99,923 clusters.

(With agency inputs)