Following the Supreme Court order on Aadhaar, the Department of Telecom will ensure that the reverification of KYC is smooth for mobile customers who have demanded deletion of their Aadhaar details from their service providers’ servers.

The Supreme Court had in its decision on September 26, barred private companies from seeking Aadhaar-based authentication, saying it was “unconstitutional”.

Sources in DoT said it would soon meet with telcos to discuss solutions to ensure services to customers are not affected during reverification, which could generally take two-three days.

“They (operators) will have to comply with the Supreme Court order, and we will sit with them and see what needs to be done by them because we don’t want customers to be inconvenienced,” a senior DoT official said.

The official said telcos will now have to use the earlier methods of verifications before giving out a new connection, which takes longer.

The official further said it would be left to customers to decide whether or not they wished to give their Aadhaar details

A source from one of the telecom operators said, “We have to print more forms for verification and hire agencies to send them out to the addresses to verify the identity of the customers, which will cost a lot to the company.”.

The telcos had to put a system in place for Aadhaar-based e-KYC earlier, which too entailed a big investment, he said.

For instance, all the 22.7 crore (as of July) subscribers of Reliance Jio were provided SIMs based on the Aadhaar eKYC system; likewise, around 50 per cent of the other telcos, including Bharti Airtel, Vodafone India and Idea Cellular (the last two-named have merged now) gave out SIMS based on eKYC.

Meanwhile, the Telecom Commission held on Wednesday has agreed to the TRAI recommendations on the 60-day notice to the regulator for closure of its services and 30-day notice to subscribers.

Also, the DoT has approved enabling in-flight connectivity to provide calls and data services to air passengers. Now, it will be the decision of the flight operators when to start the services, and at what tariffs, sources said.

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