Patna: Deputy chief minister Sushil Kumar Modi, who heads the information technology (IT) department, rolled out the Aadhaar authentication service on Tuesday that would help departments authenticate identities of beneficiaries.

The department has developed the Bihar Aadhaar Authentication Framework, which for now will only be available for government departments.

Modi said: "Linking bank accounts of beneficiaries of various schemes with Aadhaar number has brought transparency in delivering benefits and weeding out fake and duplicate beneficiaries."

He claimed that the country had saved over Rs 90,000 crore by ushering in transparency in transferring benefits to the target group. Sharing data about Bihar, he said of 8.19 crore bank accounts in the state, Aadhaar seeding had been done in 5.82 crore accounts and Aadhaar authentication had been done in 4.84 crore accounts.

Before the launch, IT secretary Rahul Singh gave a presentation on the service and said the department had registered itself with the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) as authentication service agency and authentication user agency.

The framework, he said, will provide two major services - authenticating Aadhaar numbers and enabling e-KYC. Till Tuesday, at least 13 lakh people were authenticated.