How to lock and unlock Aadhaar Card online and prevent misuse?

Aadhaar is now turning to be one of the most important KYC document. Hence, protecting your privacy from any misuse is also important. Let us see how to lock and unlock Aadhaar Card online and protect from misuse.

You must all know that while obtaining Aadhaar card you provide your biometric information like retinal and fingerprint scan data to the government. These two data are unique to each individual. However, recently there were some news items which claimed that Aadhaar data of many individuals were leaked.

Hence, it is now imperative for an individual to safeguard his interest while sharing Aadhaar card information with anyone. Nowadays many financial institutions like banks or even your SIM provider using the facility called e-KYC or Biometric based e-KYC to validate the proof.

What do you mean by Biometric e-KYC?

When you enroll for Aadhaar, UDAI stores the demographic information such as name, address, date of birth/age, gender, mobile number, email address. Along with this, UDAI also stores biometric information refers to the iris, finger prints and facial photograph of which the fingerprint and iris data is to be used for authentication.

Let us assume you apply for a bank account opening and you provided Aadhaar number for the same. Now, instead of accepting the photocopy of Aadhaar, banks started using “Biometric e-KYC”.

You will have to provide your Aadhaar number to the banker (in this example). The concerned banker will enter your Aadhaar number into an Aadhaar-based authentication system. In the next step, in order to access to your KYC details are being granted to the bank under your authorization, you have to authenticate yourself using your fingerprint.

If the fingerprint scanned at the device matches with the one in the Aadhaar database, it is considered to be an approval from you and your KYC details are shared with the Bank. You no need to submit the photocopy of your Aadhaar card.

This is the actually foolproof process and completely eliminated the process of submitting hard copies and may be misused.

Once someone does an e-KYC using your Aadhaar number, then immediately you will receive an email and SMS message to your phone registered with them. The email looks like below.

Aadhaar eKYC Successful

Even though this eliminated many risks like misuse of your Aadhaar photocopy and foolproof solution, but there are still few instances where your fingerprints itself were copied and misused.

Hence, to provide one more layer of security, UDAI come up with lock and unlock Aadhaar Card online.

How to lock and unlock Aadhaar Card online?

Now you came to know the importance of your biometric information of Aadhaar. To avoid any misuse of your such biometric information, UDAI came up with another layer of security to lock and unlock Aadhaar Card online.

Let us see now the process of how to lock and unlock Aadhaar Card online. Do remember few facts about this service.

# Once you locked Biometrics, then you will not be able to use your Biometrics (fingerprints/iris) for authentications thus preventing potential misuse.

# Lock and unlock Aadhaar Card online ONLY possible. You can’t do it offline.

# You must be registered your mobile number to avail this facility. Because UDAI will send a one-time password to your registered number.

# Once you lock, then you can unlock it only for 10 minutes. After this temporary unlock period, your Aadhaar will be blocked again automatically. This is done for the purpose of protection.

# Do remember that using this facility, you can only protect your Aadhaar who try to access your Aadhaar data using your biometric access.

How to lock Aadhaar Card online?

First, let us see the process of how to lock Aadhaar Card online.

Step 1-Visit the UDAI Aadhaar Biometric Locking link.

lock and unlock Aadhaar Card online

 

Step 2-Enter your 12 digits unique Aadhaar number and the code available next. Then click on Send OTP. UDAI will send OTP to your registered mobile number.

Remember that this OTP will be valid only for 30 minutes. You have to enter this OTP in the space provided for and click on Log in.

Step 3-Then you have to click on the tab “Enable” to lock the Aadhaar biometric by entering the code available side to it. The screen looks like below.

Aadhaar Biometric Locking

Step 4-Then you will receive the successful message of locked Aadhaar Biometric as below.

Aadhaar Lock Successful message

This is the process of locking your Aadhaar Biometric online.

How to unlock Aadhaar Card online?

We now understood the process of locking Aadhaar Card online. Now whenever we have to give permission to authenticate our Aadhaar details, then we have to unlock the same.

Do remember that this unlock is temporary. UDAI will lock your Aadhaar automatically after 10 minutes. Hence, each time you want to give permission for someone to authenticate, you have to follow this process.

Step 1-Visit the UDAI Aadhaar Biometric Locking link.

lock and unlock Aadhaar Card online

Step 2-Enter your 12 digits unique Aadhaar number and the code available next. Then click on Send OTP. UDAI will send OTP to your registered mobile number.

Remember that this OTP will be valid only for 30 minutes. You have to enter this OTP in the space provided for and click on Log in.

Step 3-Then you have to click on the tab “unlock” to unlock the Aadhaar biometric by entering the code available side to it. The screen looks like below.

Aadhaar Biometric Unlocking or Disabling

Here you notice that you have one more option “Disable”. By clicking this tab, you are completing disabling the locking feature of your Aadhaar Card Biometric data.

Step 4-Then you will receive the successful message of Aadhaar unblocked.

Successful message of Aadhaar Unblocking

Hope this information is useful to all and activate this facility of lock and unlock Aadhaar Card online and prevent misuse. Do remember that by using this facility you are protecting someone’s unauthentic biometric entry for your Aadhaar data.

However, if share your physical copies with someone or your Aadhaar number with someone, then the risk is always there.

33 Responses

  1. Hello,
    Facing a peculiar problem for aadhar unlock. A few months ago I had locked my biometric aadhar details through the website and now would like to unlock it. However I am facing a peculiar situation. I have my mobile no. (9xxxxxxxxxx) registered with my Adhaar card. The mobile no. is an AIRCEL (Mobile operator) no. However recently AIRCEL have stopped their service in my hometown and henceforth for the whole country. Any calls or SMS have therefore stopped coming through my no. (9xxxxxxxxxx). Thus for unlocking my Aadhar I am unable to receive or see any OPT (One-time-password) being send for unlocking. I am in a dire situation as I cannot buy a new SIM or port this no. ((9xxxxxxxxxx)) to any other operator since all these require Aadhar card verification, in my case, which remains locked. I have my email at yahoo also registered in the Aadhar site but OPT is not being received in my email, it is only send to my mobile no. (9xxxxxxxxxx). Any aadhar enrolment centre personel is unable to help me in this situation. Don’t know what to do . I have a alternate JIO no. which is active and can receive calls and SMS which I can register with Adhaar if my account gets unlocked. . Any suggestions would be very helpful.
    – Regards

    Debasish

      1. To me it worked like what ragavba said. Your Biometric locked,….. disabled,….. unlocked dialog page did not come. Pls check once again

          1. sir, did u try?, r u getting inbetween steps? u have said worked like what i shared in above post. thats y am asking.

  2. i am facing any issue sir?, or server working properly now? did u get 4th and last image in youe post. pls tell me sir, when locking and unlocking?

  3. just now tried to disable my biometric lock, i am unable to disable biometric lock. whenever i hit disable button after login this message am getting “Some issue occured while executing the activity. Please retry after sometime”. for this sake only we should not lock our biometrics. we cannot trust our govt and govt websites. now i have to run behind UIDAI. complete waste of time for me now. pathetic govt

      1. sir, i am very confused now, pls refer your images in your post. after logging in am seeing 6th image that is your biometric is locked, when i hit disable, 3rd image coming, your biometric lock is disabled. am not getting very last image i.e your biometric is unlocked. after i closed the browser.

        again i logged in again am getting 6th image that is your biometric is locked. i did not lock at all. 4th and last image not coming

        this happening whenever i login after disabling lock. tried 7, 8 times, same result only am getting.

        sir, pls tell me am i facing any issue or website server problem?. if u dont mind you try with your own aadhaar and tell me sir, pls

          1. tried 21 times , just saw my emai aadhaar authentication sucessful 21 times. i closed the browser in disabled stage. i hope i disabled it. some after 10 days i will lock again.

            1. i think now login is lock, and closing the browser after disable/unlock is disable/unlock. i think this is the sequence. am not sure.

  4. hi sir, what happens if we lose our mobile phone number which is registered with aadhaar after locking aadhaar Bio?. even if we want same phone number on new sim we need aadhaar biometric authentication. then how to unlock aadhaar? any solution???!!! OTP received in SMS not email.

    1. even sim gets damaged we cant unlock aadhaar. OTP should be sent to registered email not SMS. my opnion, we should not lock our aadhaar. whats your view sir?

  5. If I lock my Aadhar, and someone, say bank, need to do authentication will be able to do?
    Or everytime I need to anticipate this & unlock my Aadhar

  6. Good information article. And recently I seen the same feature in mAadhar also. which we can do in mobile.

  7. Very useful information and explained very well.
    Have a related question – how can you add mobile number to Adhar, if not added before?

  8. Nice information.
    But query is that in case server is down and one is in need of adhar use than what will happen .

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