The telecom department will soon meet officials at the Unique Identification Authority of India ( UIDAI ) and law ministry to find out if Aadhaar-based biometric verification can still be used if a person so wishes. Telecom operators, meanwhile, said they would send their concerns to the government in three weeks and seek directions on what they should do as the Supreme Court has barred private companies from using the 12-digit Aadhaar number to validate the identity of customers“We will have meetings with Aadhaar authorities, with TSPs (telecom service providers) and with the law ministry to ensure that we are in complete compliance with the Supreme Court,” Aruna Sundararajan, secretary of the Department of Telecommunications ( DoT ), said Thursday. “This (Aadhaar-based verification) has been a convenience; so now on a voluntary basis, if people want to use Aadhaar, can they or not? We will probably have to seek advice on this also.”UIDAI, which issues Aadhaar numbers and manages the biometric database, has also said it would hold inter-ministerial meetings involving the finance and telecom departments to discuss issues arising out of Wednesday’s Supreme Court order.Mobile phone companies said the court verdict would lead to delays in getting phone connections and increase the cost of customer acquisition, in some cases by as much as 10 times. These operators had adopted the Aadhaar-based real-time electronic KYC (know your customer) process to issue mobile connections, compared with physical verification that used to take five to seven days."We along with our lawyers are reviewing the order to obtain a clear understanding of it. Once this is done, we will arrive at an industry consensus on Aadhaar and submit our views to DoT," said Rajan Mathews, director general of the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) that represents all major telcos. “This will probably take two or three weeks.”More than 24 hours since the Supreme Court struck down a portion of Section 57 of the Aadhaar Act, operators remained befuddled on the implementation of the part of the order that says authentication records obtained via Aadhaar that are already with them should not be stored beyond six months."We need clarity on what documents need to be destroyed. We store the KYC details which have the subscriber's address and identity proof. Lately, they are linked to Aadhaar for easier verification but now does this mean we have to destroy just the Aadhaar number or the documents linked to it,” asked a senior executive in one of the large telcos.Clarification is also needed on the methods that can be used to destroy the data, he said.Telcos are also grappling with the issue of eKYC. While the verdict says Aadhaar is not mandatory, an earlier DoT directive said eKYC was compulsory, which required the finger prints and Aadhaar number of the customer. According to operators, now they might have to move to the old KYC method wherein the customer fills up a form with necessary details and furnishes the supporting documents. But to stop eKYC, they still need a direction from the telecom department.DoT secretary Sundararajan said since Aadhaar-backed verification was a convenience for many, the department would see if “something we can do to get this convenience (back) because some form of digital identity is useful for eKYC”.She said also the department would soon meet operators to resolve the issues around implementation of the SC order.“We will also have meetings with the telecom service providers to ensure that the apex court ruling of destroying customer data within six months is duly followed,” she added.The industry estimates the number of Aadhaar-linked subscribers at about 500 million — mostly in urban areas — or about half of India’s total mobile users. Moreover, over 80% of new users are being enrolled using the Aadhaar e-verification process.A senior executive at a carrier said his company might now have to deal with subscribers who would want to delink their Aadhaar number from the verification process, even though there was no clear mandate on what should then be done."We will wait for DoT's instructions but till that comes, it is quite a mess," said the executive, who did not want to be named.