The government will soon be make it mandatory for linking Adhaar card with driving licenses ,said Union Minister for Law, Electronics and Information Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad.

"We are soon going to bring a law which will make it mandatory to link Aadhaar with driving licence", said Prasad delivering his presidential address at the ongoing 106th Indian Science Congress at Lovely Professional University.

Explaining the need for the linkage, Prasad said, "At presently, what happens is that the guilty person who causes an accident flees the scene and gets a duplicate licence. This helps him go scot-free. However, with the Aadhaar linkage you can change your name but you cannot change your biometrics, neither iris nor fingerprints."

So, the moment one goes in for a duplicate licence, the system will say this person already has a driving licence and should not be given a new one, the IT minister added.

Praising about the Centre's 'Digital India' programme, the minister claimed that it had bridged the urban-rural divide.

"This is a digital profile of India — 123 crore Aadhaar cards, 121 crore mobile phones, 44.6 crore smart phones, and 56 crore internet users. There has been a 51 per cent growth in e-commerce. India has a population of 130 crore," said Prasad through a presentation.

He also said that the digital payment transactions in the country have increased manifold to over Rs 2,070 crore in 2017-18.

LPU Chancellor Ashok Mittal, Punjab BJP President Shwait Malik and Phagwara MLA Som Parkash were also present on the occasion.

While several states have taken steps to improve issuance of driving licence, lack of a shared national data-base makes it difficult to track duplication. The same problem affected issuance of passports until recording of biometrics was introduced which reduced the incidence of duplicate and fraudulent documents.

(Featured image: www.jagran.com)