LIC not to seek Aadhaar for online access

The Life Insurance Corporation of India said it will remove the mandatory requirement of providing Aadhaar number for customers to access their policy pages, saying it was “inadvertently done”. “Subsequent to the migration to a new portal, the LIC has planned to extend the range of facilities offered to our customers online,” the executive director said. “Keeping in mind that data security and privacy are of paramount importance and also abiding by the regulator’s directives, we have sought additional information from the customer to establish his online credentials. In the process, seeking of Aadhaar number, PAN details mandatorily was inadvertently done,” the official said. The official added that the issue had been escalated to their technical team and “we will be removing the requirements of the mandatory providing of Aadhaar number and PAN”. However, the official did not specify a date by which this would be done. Many customers had raised objections regarding this move of LIC on Twitter.