By Saket Suman
The government has introduced the facility of instant allotment of Permanent Account Number (PAN) card using Aadhaar-based e-KYC. If you have a valid Aadhaar number and your mobile number is registered with it then you can get your electronic PAN issued in 10 minutes. The service is free of cost.
Union Minister for Finance and Corporate Affairs Nirmala Sitharaman launched the facility on Thursday in New Delhi.
What do you need to do to get the PAN card issued under the new service? The process is fully electronic. You can make the application through e-filing website of the Income Tax Department. You need submit basic details and provide your valid Aadhaar number and then submit the OTP received on your Aadhaar registered mobile number. On successful completion of this process, a 15-digit acknowledgment number is generated. If required, the applicant can check the status of the request anytime by providing her/his valid Aadhaar number and on successful allotment, can download the e-PAN. The e-PAN is also sent to the applicant on her/his email id, if it is registered with Aadhaar.
The finance minister had made an announcement in this regard in the Union Budget for 2020-21 presented earlier this year.
“In the last Budget, I had introduced the interchangeability of PAN and Aadhaar for which necessary rules were already notified. In order to further ease the process of allotment of PAN, soon we will launch a system under which PAN shall be instantly allotted online on the basis of Aadhaar without any requirement for filling up of detailed application form,” Sitharaman had said in the budget speech.
Although the facility was formally launched on May 28, its ‘Beta version’ on trial basis was started on 12th Feb 2020 on the e-filing website of Income Tax Department. Since then 6,77,680 instant PANs have been allotted with a turnaround time of about 10 minutes, till 25th May 2020, according to an official statement released by Union Finance Ministry.
