Digging into the tech behind the Massive Adhaar PAN link drive

While the Finance Ministry’s announcement regarding linking PAN with Aadhaar has reached its last day. The Finance Ministry has declared that Non-linking of PAN with Aadhaar number by March 31, 2022, would attract a penalty of Rs 500 up to three months from April 1, 2022, and a fee of Rs 1,000 after that. Nevertheless, the non-linked PAN will remain operational till March 31, 2023. Though have you noticed how do technologies make the process flexible and safe?

In 2003, the Aadhaar card was rolled out as a first initiative, as a 12-digit unique identification number issued by the Indian government to every individual resident of India that can be used to access a variety of services and benefits. The technology behind the Aadhaar card project is Hadoop. Hadoop, an open-source big data processing framework, has been customized excessively by the firm named MapR to upgrade performance.

The Aadhaar card project has been developed using MapR’s customized Hadoop and its ecosystems. The design principle of distributed data storage mechanism and parallel data processing made it possible to store billions of identities and would continue to grow as the resident population expands. The Aadhar card project established network and data center load balancing and a multi-location distributed architecture for horizontal scale to achieve such massive scalability.

Security and privacy is the key fundamental of the Aadhaar card project. Resident data and raw biometrics are always kept encrypted, using 2048-bit PKI encryption and tamper detection using HMAC.

Using the parallel data processing paradigm, Aadhaar card systems can handle millions of transactions across billions of records doing hundreds of trillions of biometric matches every day.

Hadoop is a combination of two core components, viz. Hadoop distributed file system (HDFS) and Map Reduce. HDFS is responsible for storing the data distributed across thousands of physical servers, and Map Reduce, a computing framework, processes the data-parallel across the physical servers.

Benefits of linking of PAN with Aadhaar

As per the current laws, linking PAN with your Aadhaar number has become mandatory. The public should know the reason and the benefits of the linking. So, it is required to complete income-tax-related tasks like filing returns on income. Everyone who has been rationed a PAN and is eligible to get an Aadhaar number has to link them.

Aadhaar, also known as a Unique Identity number, is a 12-digit number issued by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI). PAN is a 10-digit alphanumeric number allotted by the Income Tax (I-T) department. It will also avail monetary benefits from the government such as a pension, scholarship, LPG subsidy etc.

Here is how you can link your PAN with Aadhaar.

• If you are already a registered user of the income tax e-filing website

For anyone who is already filing income tax returns, the chances are that their PAN is already linked with Aadhaar if they have mentioned it previously while filing ITR in the previous assessment years. It is done by the income tax department in case details of both are already available with it.

In case you can check if your Aadhaar is already linked to your PAN by visiting the income tax e-filing website www.incometaxindiaefiling.gov.in

Login to the website by entering PAN (User ID) and password. Once you are logged in, and your account opens, click on 'Profile Settings' by clicking the arrow next to your name. The profile will show your Aadhaar number partially as linked.

• For non-registered users

For those who don't want to register themselves at the e-filing website, there is another way using which you can link your PAN and Aadhaar. A hyperlink has been provided on the homepage of the new income tax portal: www.incometax.gov.in

Need to click on 'Link Aadhaar' on the e-filing website. A new form will appear where you must provide details - PAN, Aadhaar number, Name as per Aadhaar and mobile number.

If your Aadhaar card has only year of birth, then you must also tick the option: 'I have only year of birth in Aadhaar card'. You must also agree to validate my Aadhaar details. Click on 'Link Aadhaar'.

Once the submission is successful, a message will be displayed on your screen showing your PAN is successfully linked to Aadhaar.

PAN Card can be easily linked to the Aadhaar number online as the Income Tax department permits users to link the two unique identification numbers through its website. 

Some Points to Note:

 1. If using online methods, an Aadhaar OTP will be generated if your name does not match that on your PAN card, whereas your date of birth and gender match. The OTP will be sent to the mobile number registered/linked to the Aadhaar number entered online. You will have to enter that OTP online to continue and complete the linking process.

2. You should get it corrected before trying to link the two numbers in case there is a mismatch in the data of PAN and Aadhaar.

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