The country saved more than Rs 90,000 crore up to March 31, 2018 since the inception of the Aadhaar-based Direct Benefit Transfer, said chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India, J Satyanarayana, on Wednesday.

“We have not spent even Rs 10,000 crore on Aadhaar cards and related systems so far,” Satyanarayana said, at an international conference on digital identity, according to PTI. “But the savings are enormous. We were able to save Rs 90,012 crore as on March 31 this year by using Aadhaar in some of the schemes such as Public Distribution System. We were able to weed out bogus and duplicate beneficiaries by using Aadhaar.”

The UIDAI official said there is a need for research in creating more efficient bio-metric identification systems, improvements in security of Aadhaar eco-system, processes of enrolment, updating, and authentication, among others.

Satyanarayana said 121 crore people have so far enrolled for Aadhaar card, and on an average, over 30 million e-transactions are done using the biometric system. He said Aadhaar data is kept safe and secure in about 7,000 servers in Bengaluru, and Manesar in Haryana, PTI reported.