Govt working on Aadhaar vault to protect sensitive data

The Delhi Government is working to come up with an Aadhaar vault to safeguard important personal details furnished by citizens for various schemes and services with their applications.

The Information and Technology Department of the Government is implementing the project based on the directions and guidelines of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI). The National Informatics Centre (NIC) has already successfully tested the vault on a staging server, an official said.

The Aadhaar number is required for filing online applications for various Delhi government schemes and services, which need to be protected, said a senior Government officer. The Aadhaar vault has many benefits as it ensures protection of the sensitive identity data, affording a high-level data security, thereby preventing misuse of details of individual Aadhaar, he said.

Further, it supports a secure integration of Aadhaar details with e-governance services. An agreement was signed by the Government with the Centre for Advanced Computing in May this year, to store the e-District and the proposed unified data hub (UDH) data in the Aadhaar vault.

The e-District portal of the Delhi Government is used for submitting online applications for various schemes and to get important documents like caste and income certificates. In a recent meeting, Delhi IT Minister Pankaj Singh reviewed the work on the project and instructed officials to speed it up.

In order to maintain the privacy of sensitive Aadhaar numbers and details, the UIDAI in 2017 made it mandatory to store all Aadhaar numbers collected by various agencies for authentication purposes. It is intended to be a centralised, dedicated storage in encrypted form for security purposes.

Aadhaar Data Vault enables e-governance applications in eliminating Aadhaar footprint in the IT eco-system and builds an abstraction layer for the safeguard of Aadhaar numbers and the related data, officials said.