Government asks central public sector enterprises to enrol employees under Aadhaar

Government asks central public sector enterprises to enrol employees under Aadhaar

NEW DELHI: After central government employees, the Narendra Modi administration has turned its focus on public sector enterprises, directing all central public sector enterprises (CPSEs) to ensure that their employees are enrolled under Aadhaar and it should be used for a host of purposes, including attendance and salary disbursement.

There are around 13.51 lakh employees, excluding contractual workers in 290 CPSEs.

In a circular, the department of public enterprises (DPE), a nodal agency for all state-run enterprises, has said, “Aadhaar card be adopted for enrolment of CPSE employees, contract and daily workers for various purposes like attendance, payment of wages, provident fund and employee state insurance (ESI).”

Asenior official with DPE confirmed the development, saying all administrative ministries have been ‘requested’ to ensure that the CPSEs under them have their employees on the Aadhaar platform. “A review will soon be held and we will take up the matter with administrative ministries concerned in case of erring PSUs,” he said, adding that this may also form part of the memorandum of understanding (MoU) which staterun firms sign with the government.

According to Public Enterprise (PE) Survey 2014, salary and wages went up in all CPSEs from Rs 1.16 lakh crore in 2012-13 to Rs 1.21 lakh crore in 2013-14, showing a growth of 4.02%. “We expect that all PSUs will move on to Aadhaar-enabled biometric attendance system, as is the case with most central government offices,” said the above quoted official.
Some CPSEs said they will raise the issue with their administrative ministries as it’s not feasible to link Aadhaar number of their contractual employees. “In case of contract and daily wage workers, it is not feasible and they may not provide us with requisite details,” said an official with an oil sector PSU, adding that they have already linked the Aadhaar number of their employees with their provident fund. “We have units in different locations and it will take time to phase out the manual system of attendance,” said another official with a state-run firm. In March 2015, the Supreme Court had upheld its earlier decision that “no person should suffer for not getting the Aadhaar card”, but in spite of that some authority had issued a circular making it mandatory.

Source: ET