Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman today formally launched the facility for instant allotment of PAN cards using Aadhaar-based e-KYC as announced in the Union Budget earlier. The facility is now available for all those PAN applicants who possess a valid Aadhaar number and have a mobile number registered in the UIDAI database.
Issued on a near to real time basis, the allotment process is paperless and an electronic PAN (e-PAN) is issued to the applicants free of cost by the income tax department.
Although the facility of instant PAN through Aadhaar based e-KYC was launched formally today, however, its ‘Beta version’ on trial basis has been on the e-filing website of I-T department since February.
In a release, the department said since then more than 6.7 lakh instant PAN cards have been allotted to taxpayers. The turnaround time has been just about 10 minutes. The process is simple and quick.
The income tax department said as on May 25th, a total of 50.52 crore PANs have been allotted to taxpayers, out of which, around 49.39 crore are allotted to individuals and more than 32.17 crore are seeded with Aadhaar so far.
It is mandatory to link PAN card with Aadhaar within June 30 this year, failing which it will become inoperative. The income tax department has also allowed all income tax payers to use their Aadhaar number in lieu of PAN.
