india

Updated: Jan 10, 2018 20:18 IST

India’s department of telecommunications has exempted non-resident Indians (NRIs) and those holding Overseas Citizen of India (OCI) and Persons of Indian Origin (PIO) cards from the mandatory linking of their Aadhaar number to their cellphone connections.

In a statement, the Indian high commission in Ottawa said that “a large number of overseas Indians have been making representations about facing difficulty in operating their mobile connections procured in India as the telecom operators are insisting on linking Aadhaar number with the mobile number”.

Since NRIs are ineligible for Aadhaar, given its residency requirements, they were unable to comply with this procedure for mobile numbers in India.

“The matter was taken up with the Department of Telecom (DoT) for exempting overseas Indians from linking Aadhaar with their Indian mobile connections and issuing suitable advisory to telecom service providers,” the high commission’s statement said.

It added that the department had issued a letter to “all mobile phone service licensees to use alternative method to re-verify existing customers belonging to certain categories including foreigners (covering PIOs and OCI cardholders) and NRIs”.

Last year, when Indian-origin residents had faced a similar quandary in terms of mandatory quoting of Aadhaar number for filing income tax returns in India or obtaining Permanent Account Number (PAN) cards, the finance ministry’s Central Board of Direct Taxes had made an exception for them.

It had stated then that “only a resident individual was entitled to obtain Aadhar” and as that required a person to be in India for at least 182 days or more in the 12-month period prior to enrolment, the requirement to quote Aadhar “shall not apply to an individual who is not a resident as per the Aadhar Act, 2016”.