The government is planning to link property transactions with Aadhaar soon in a bid to reduce black money in the real estate sector and crack down on benami properties, Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Housing Hardeep Puri told The Economic Times on Tuesday.

“Seeding Aadhaar to property transactions is a great idea but I’m not going to make an announcement on that,” he said. “We are already linking Aadhaar to bank accounts, etc, and we can take some additional steps for property market also.”

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Puri agreed when asked if linking Aadhaar with property transactions was a logical conclusion of the government’s drive to use Aadhaar to improve transparency. Puri said that while no document can say with certainty that a transaction between two individuals has been absolutely transparent, large-value transactions such as property could be monitored by linking it with Aadhaar.

Linking Aadhaar to air tickets

The Airports Authority of India will implement the government’s “digi yatra” scheme in 2018 as a pilot project at the Ahmedabad, Kolkata and Vijayawada airports, allowing flyers to use stored biometrics under an Aadhaar-based system to prove their identity, The Times of India reported on Wednesday. This is meant to eliminate the need for physical copies of ID cards, tickets and boarding passes.

“This solution provides the passenger an option to enter Aadhaar number while booking,” AAI chairperson Guruprasad Mohapatra said. “At the airport entry, an E-gate will read the ticket’s bar code containing ticket and Aadhaar information. The system will authenticate travel details and the passenger will present biometric details for Aadhaar authentication. On successful authentication, the E-gate will open.”

He said that those who do not opt for Aadhaar as their identity card while booking will have to go through the manual process of verification at the airports.