Aadhaar requested by insurance companies in spite of extension of deadline
Posted on: 18/Jan/2018 2:40:26 PM
Many insurance companies have been insisting that customers part with their Aadhaar details to access their services. This is in spite of the government extending the deadline for linking Aadhaar to various services to March 31.
Principal among such insurers is the Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC), whose newly designed web portal requires mandatory registration of policy holders’ Aadhaar details to even access their own policy pages. It also seems to be the first instance of its kind when access to a web page is denied for want of Aadhaar details.
According to legal experts, LIC’s insistence on Aadhaar to even access the policy page on its website violates the spirit of both the Supreme Court’s orders and the insurance regulator’s circular on the deadline. This is worse than a pay wall. It is an act of coercion.
The Prevention of Money Laundering (Seventh Amendment) Rules, 2017, extending the Aadhaar deadline to the end of March, was notified on December 13. Following this, the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority (IRDA) issued a notification to that effect.
Say policy holders, Since I had to download my policy receipts, I had no other way out but to submit my Aadhaar number to access my account. It was my mom’s LIC account. The Aadhaar and PAN details are not updated with LIC. But my sister did update her account to pay the premium.
The IRDA guidelines say that the date of submission of the Aadhaar Number and Permanent Account Number or Form 60 by the clients to the reporting entity is 31st March, 2018 or six months from the date of commencement of account based relationship.
