Imagine you are a labourer in a village in Odisha and have painstakingly completed your Aadhaar formalities (for which you gave a proof of permanent address and your fingerprints). You moved to Chennai for some short-term opportunities on a construction site. While in Chennai, you are staying in a tenement with a few people from your village and want to open a bank account so that it’s easier to remit money to your family back in Odisha. You would realize that despite having an Aadhaar number, you need to have some proof of address in Chennai to be eligible for a bank account; a document extremely hard to produce for someone newly arrived in the city. This single requirement of a local address proof was potentially a barrier for millions of migrant workers (not just low-income) from accessing a bank account.
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