The Centre on Monday launched a dedicated website to allow the public access to 3,000 maps prepared by the Survey General of India, but made a subscription to Aadhaar mandatory for the service, PTI reported. The SGI completed 250 years on Monday.

Minister of Science and Technology Harsh Vardhan said that making the Aadhaar number mandatory for entering the website would ensure that “only Indians” used it. The SGI has provided a link on which one can download up to three maps a day using one’s Aadhaar number as the login ID. The site has been designed, developed and hosted by the National Informatics Commission, Uttarakhand.

“We wanted to make [having a] passport mandatory for this service, but then not everyone has one. So, we have made Aadhaar mandatory for people [to enter the site],” said Swarna Subba Rao, Surveyor General of India. The Centre has already made having an Aadhaar number mandatory for several government services such as getting subsidised cooking gas and midday meals. It has also made it compulsory for filing Income Tax returns and is considering making it mandatory for booking air tickets.

The SGI has a rich collection of more than 5,000 maps, of which 3,000 have now been made accessible to the public, a provision of the National Map Policy, 2005. “Earlier, even government departments had to pay money to get maps from the SGI. We have relaxed that norm now,” Ashutosh Sharma, secretary, Ministry of Science and Technology, said.