In relief to banks and POS machine companies, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has extended the deadline for making sure that all new card acceptance devices will have Aadhaar and biometric capabilities to June 30, 2017. Earlier, the RBI said RBI says that any new card acceptance infrastructure needs to be compliant with Aadhaar and biometric scanners from January 1st, 2017. "It has been brought to our notice that the rate of deployment of acceptance infrastructure has slowed down owing to the mismatch between demand and supply of such Aadhaar-enabled devices. Therefore, on a review, it has been decided to extend the time for deployment of Aadhaar-enabled devices till June 30, 2017," the RBI added. Note that the RBI said that it will be coming out with detailed guidelines on enablement of existing card acceptance infrastructure for processing payment transactions using Aadhaar-based biometric authentication, although a date was not mentioned. This is not the first time the RBI has sent a notification to banks about Aadhaar-enabled POS and ATMs. It had sent out a notification back in November 2013 which was met with opposition from banks who said that the cost of new machines would be too high and Aadhaar will have very little acceptance in authentication of payments. The RBI then shelved decision for Aadhaar-based authentication for payments in May 2014. Aadhaar did not have a proper legal framework in 2013 and the Supreme Court ruled that it cannot be made mandatory for services. However, the Aadhaar Act was passed in…
