Government defies six Supreme Court orders on Aadhaar

Despite the Supreme Court of India reminding the Government at least six times that acquiring an Aadhaar number for unique identity is a ‘voluntary’ and not compulsory exercise, the Government has merrily flouted the interim ruling and gone ahead with making it mandatory for availing any benefit or subsidy from the Government, says lawyer and activist Usha Ramanathan.

“Even the Supreme Court is no longer bothered,” she laughs and points out that a few friends visiting Ranthambore this month discovered that they could not even hire a jeep if they failed to offer their ‘Aadhaar’ identity. The order in any case has become infructuous because the Unique Identity Development Authority of India (UIDAI) claims to have already enrolled over 1.04 billion Indians, with virtually every Indian adult claimed to have been enrolled.

However, no audit has been done so far and there is no information on duplications, faulty identities, applications rejected and, more crucially, of identity theft.

Ironically the six different orders of the Supreme Court has not deterred the Government from demanding Aadhaar numbers for land and property registrations and even renewing lease agreements. Even the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in the national capital has offered to provide concessions to patients registering with Aadhaar.

In August, 2015 the apex court had ordered “The Union of India shall give wide publicity in the electronic and print media that it is not mandatory to obtain an Aadhaar card (Number) ...it will not be a condition for obtaining benefits otherwise due to a citizen.”

In September, 2016 the court reminded the Government, “The Aadhaar Card (sic) scheme is purely voluntary and it cannot be made mandatory till the matter is finally decided by this court one way or the other”.

Pune-based cyber security expert Anupam Saraph meanwhile has been warning that bank accounts opened under the Prime Minister’s Jan Dhan Yojana can be used easily for money laundering—an apprehension that appears to have come true in the wake of the ban on high denomination ₹500 and ₹1,000 currency notes. Read this report in TheQuint.com: “Under the Prime Minister Jan Dhan Yojana, an Aadhaar card is all you need to open a no-frills account. In 2015-2016, CSCs [Common Services Centres] like Kumar’s generated over 6 crore, largely unaudited, Aadhaar numbers, while printing out Aadhaar cards accounted for the largest number of transactions at CSCs. In the process, CSCs have unwittingly become repositories for the sensitive private data of millions of Indians, which could be used to open and operate untold numbers of Jan Dhan (no-frills) bank accounts to park and launder money through India’s increasingly porous financial system.”