New Delhi, January 26:
The Centre is examining various questions raised by Software Freedom Law
Centre (SFLC), a legal services organisation, with regard to violation
of the Supreme Court’s order against making Aadhaar mandatory for access
to certain services, sources close to the development, told BusinessLine.
According to sources, Ravi Shankar Prasad, Minister of Electronics and
Information Technology, has recently responded to a letter by Rajya
Sabha MP, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, saying he was ‘getting the matter
examined’.
Chandrasekhar, in his letter to Prasad in December, had asked the
government to state the ‘correct position under law’ on the issue of
Aadhaar being made mandatory by various government and private entities
with regard to their schemes, which, he said was a violation of the apex
court’s orders.
Chandrasekhar had also raised question in the Rajya Sabha in November,
after which SFLC had written in detail to Chandrashekar, listing out
about 120 violations between September 2015 and September 2016, based on
which the MP had written a letter to Prasad, who incidentally is also
the Law & Justice Minister.
Exempted schemes
The Aadhaar scheme is instituted and operated by the Unique Authority of
India (UIDAI) and in 2015, the Supreme Court had restricted the
voluntary use of Aadhaar to six government schemes — the public
distribution system (PDS), LPG, Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment
Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), Prime Minister’s Jan Dhan Yojna and National
Social Assistance Programme (old age and widow pension). The court had
clearly emphasised that no person should be denied any service for lack
of an Aadhaar card or number.
However, many schemes are being run wherein Aadhaar has been made mandatory to avail of the services.
Citing SFLC’s list, Chandrasekhar highlighted some of the schemes wherein Aadhaar has been made mandatory.
“For instance, he has mentioned government considering EPFO’s voluntary
pension scheme linked with Aadhaar, Linking BPL ration cards with
Aadhaar made mandatory for PDS in Bengaluru, Paytm starting
Aadhaar-based KYC process, government saying households not to get LPG
subsidy without Aadhaar,” said a government official.
111 crore cards issued
Meanwhile, the government is enrolling Aadhaar numbers to the maximum
number of people, including children, asking the authority to enrol as
many people as possible at the earliest.
As of Wednesday, 111 crore Aadhaar cards have already been generated, according to the UIDAI website.
Recently, Prasad had also said that the more people are enrolled with
Aadhaar, the maximum number of benefits they would get. He had also said
that the government was now going to introduce a new Aadhaar-based
digital payment system for the common man.
But, several citizen groups have pointed out that the mandatory use of
Aadhaar in social welfare schemes was leading to exclusion and
harassment of the poor, and was in violation of Supreme Court’s six
orders in three years.
The citizens groups also pointed out that the Aadhaar Act 2016, ‘nowhere
authorises the seeding of the Aadhaar number in any database. “The 2016
Act clearly speaks only of ‘authentication’, viz., asking the UIDAI
database to verify that we are who we say we are. So, asking anyone to
put the number in any other database (the LPG database, for example, is
unsupported by the law),” they said.
