SUDHIR KUMAR
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 12th of Feb on the e-filing website of Income Tax Department. Since then onwards, over 6 lakh 77 thousand 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 crore are allotted to the individuals and more than 32.17 crore 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 acknowledgment number is generated. If required, the applicant can check the status of the request anytime by providing valid Aadhaar number and on successful allotment, can download the e-PAN.