Following a notification issued last week by DoT for rolling out instant Aadhaar based eKYC (Know Your Customer) verification for mobile connections in the country, major telcos including Airtel, Vodafone and Idea are in the process of deploying it across its own stores. Airtel has already rolled out the facility in all Airtel branded stores in Delhi NCR, and it plans to roll out the same across the country over the next few months, the company said in a statement. Vodafone has also initiated the process of enabling Aadhaar based verification across all Vodafone Stores and Mini Stores effective from August 24th. A spokesperson from Idea told MediaNama that it has plans to deploy Aadhaar based verification in the future, but no confirmed plans as of now. Customers can acquire both prepaid and postpaid connections and get them instantly activated by walking into stores and submitting Aadhaar eKYC or the downloaded version of the card as identity proof to a telco’s Point of Sale (PoS) counter for verification. Biometric verification using fingerprint or Iris scanners will be treated as a customer’s signature. The DoT last week instructed telcos to maintain details including complete address and codes of all PoS counters and registered distributor centres. Telcos will also have store the card details of appointed sales agents themselves. This is required so that a telco can verify whether a request for subscriber enrollment comes from an appointed agent, who in turn will verify his identity and customer’s identity via a biometric device at PoS…
