The UIDAI has authorised Common Service Centres (CSCs) to resume Aadhaar-related services "in a week", reports the Economic Times, meaning people in rural areas will be soon be able to more easily access services such as train bookings, and registrations for voter IDs cards, PAN cards, birth and death certificates, and more. And by the end of the month CSCs will also be able to update demographic details of Aadhaar users, the report quoted CSC e-Governance Services CEO Dinesh Tyagi as saying. There are 3.9 lakh CSCs across the country. CSCs had enrolled over 19 crore people into the Aadhaar program since its launch, but had stopped functioning after UIDAI decided not to renew its MoU with them in February 2018 (see letter below), citing corruption complaints and violation of the enrolment process as reasons. Interestingly, both UIDAI and CSC e-Governance Services fall under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY). CSCs, which predate Aadhaar, were meant to bring an end to long queues at government offices and the beginning of rural entrepreneurship before they became mired in corruption. That they will resume functioning is good news for people in rural areas, who won't have to travel long distances to avail government services, but it also brings privacy concerns, given that CSCs were shut down to ensure the safety of people's biometric data. The government has so far said nothing about how it plans to tackle corruption in CSCs and prevent people's data from being compromised. Journalist bought access to entire Aadhaar database…
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