 "LegalDesk joins other startups to use Aadhaar-based business services")
LegalDesk, a Bengaluru-based startup, has become the latest firm to use Aadhaar, to authenticate legal documents helping reduce cumbersome paperwork.
It joins other startups such as Novopay, a mobile payment firm that focuses on providing bank backed digital wallet in rural areas and PhonePe, a mobile wallet owned by Flipkart and TrustID, a startup that provides background verification of blue collar workers.
LegalDesk, founded by Krupesh Bhat and Ashok Kadsur, helps users seeking legal documents such as affidavits and rental agreements to authenticate their digital signatures using Aadhaar. Once a user fills in his or her Aadhaar number, an SMS code is sent to a registered mobile number and on submission, the document is authenticated with a digital signature and issued online.
"We see many opportunities in the Legal Tech space for Aadhaar based services. It is also an opportunity to use technology to help the Indian masses. We have set the ball rolling with eSignDesk.com," said Ashok Kadsur, the co-founder of LegalDesk.
LegalDesk charges Rs 25 per transaction from users for the service that removes issues with handwritten signature that often leads to legal complications.
"Government has built the platform that can be used like Aadhaar, KYC, digital lockers, UPI . But they are built in a way that companies and innovative people can use this to make more and more use cases. It is a great example of Made in Indian and Startup India coming together, " said Nandan Nilekani, former chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) on Wednesday.
He said startups such as LegalDesk are building innovations that will leverage the government-funded Aadhaar platform.
"Now just your Aadhar number is sufficient. This is the key to making documents paperless. As you can see Legaldesk is essentially democratizing the legal documents by creating templates of various kinds of documents be it rental agreements, power of attorney," said Nilekani. " And for every person who wants a legal document, they are able to ask questions and customize the documents and then you can print the document or in this case you can sign the document and send it forward. Using Esig therefore enables you to make things paperless."
Nilekani, who took a government assignment to build the national id project - UIDAI, also envisages that entrepreneurs would use Aadhaar to build set of services that could be used for common users.
India has over a billion Aadhaar users, making it the world's largest national identification project. The government has adopted Aadhaar for its direct benefit transfer to provide subsidies to millions of Indians and reduce pilferage of these funds.
"So this is how we see massive innovation happening. Where using the structure created by the Government will unleash a lot of opportunity. That's the future where government builds infrastructure and private organisation leverage it to come up with innovative solutions for better use," added Nilekani.
