Finance Minister Sitharaman launches free instant e-PAN card facility through Aadhaar

In line with the announcement made in the Union Budget, the Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman today formally launched the facility for instant allotment of PAN on near to real-time basis. This facility is now available for those PAN applicants who possess a valid Aadhaar number and have a mobile number registered with Aadhaar.

The allotment process is paperless and an electronic PAN (e-PAN) is issued to the applicants free of cost.

The beta version of the facility of instant PAN through Aadhaar based e-KYC was started on February 12, 2020, on the e-filing website of Income Tax Department. Since then onwards, over 6,77,000 instant PANs have been allotted with a turnaround time of about 10 minutes, till 25th of May.

A total of 50.52 crore PANs have been allotted to the taxpayers, out of which, around 49.39 crores are allotted to the individuals and more than 32.17 crores are seeded with Aadhaar so far.

The instant PAN applicants are required to access the e-filing website of the Income Tax Department to provide their valid Aadhaar number and then submit the OTP received on their Aadhaar registered mobile number.

On successful completion of this process, a 15-digit acknowledgement number is generated. If required, the applicant can check the status of the request anytime by providing valid Aadhaar number and on the successful allotment, can download the e-PAN.

Background

The Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman while announcing the Union Budget 2020 announced the plan to launch instant PAN facility. In para 129 of the Budget Speech, the Finance Minister had stated, "In the last Budget, I had introduced the interchangeability of PAN and Aadhaar for which necessary rules were already notified. To further ease the process of allotment of PAN, soon we will launch a system under which PAN shall be instantly allotted online based on Aadhaar without any requirement for filling up of detailed application form."