Relief for citizens as government extends deadline for PAN-Aadhaar linkage

The deadline to link PAN with Aadhaar has been extended to March 31, 2018. A five judge Constitution bench has also been set up to look into petitions challenging the government’s move to make it mandatory to link Aadhaar as petitioners argued that linkage of Aadhaar and PAN is against tight to privacy. This is the third extension given by the government to individuals to link the Permanent Account Number (PAN) with the biometric ID. As of November, 13.28 crore out of 33 crore PANs have been linked to the 12-digit biometric identifier Aadhaar.