As announced in the Union Budget earlier, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman today formally launched the facility for instant allotment of PAN card using Aadhaar-based e-KYC. The facility is now available for all those Permanent Account Number (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 for applying for instant PAN card is extremely simple. Go to the e-filing website of the Income Tax Department, share your Aadhaar number and submit the OTP generated on the Aadhaar registered mobile number.
On completion of this process, a 15-digit acknowledgment number will be generated. Once allotted, the e-PAN card can be downloaded from the portal. The e-PAN is also sent to applicant on the email id, if registered with Aadhaar.
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 your 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.
