PIL challenging constitutional validity of 'Aadhaar' project : Supreme Court seeks Centre's response

The Supreme Court on Monday sought to know the Union government’s response to a public interest litigation filed by one Mathew George challenging the constitutional validity of the Unique Identification Authority of India and the ‘Aadhaar’ scheme, which the petitioner claimed, violated the citizens’ right to privacy.

Mr. Gopal Subramanium appearing for the petitioner contended before the Court that there is possibility of misuse of personal data of citizens by private agencies

During the course of his arguments on admission, Mr. Gopal Subramanium, representing the petitioner Mathew George, submitted before the Court that it was the “responsibility of the state” to protect citizens from violations of their right to privacy.

According to Mr. Subramanium, the work of collecting information about citizens has been outsourced to private parties, who can misuse massive personal data in their hands and corrupt them, as happened in a few cases. The scheme at present is not under government control, senior counsel Gopal Subramanium further argued.

The writ petition, filed by George, a retired army officer, avers that the security credentials of agencies collecting information from citizens were not thoroughly scrutinized.

The petitioner has specifically challenged the validity of Section 14-A of the Citizenship Act, 1955, which makes it compulsory for every citizen to get his/her details entered into the National Register of Indian Citizens. The petition says that this provision is unconstitutional, being violative of the fundamental rights guaranteed by the Constitution. “It is not the mandate of the Citizenship Act to collect statistics and details of residents and citizens in India which detail is to be collected only under the Census Act. Whether or not a person’s name has to be included as a citizen in the NRIC cannot be decided by the officer entering such details in the National Population Register; and further, it seeks to collect private data of the citizens without providing for any restriction on its disclosure, use and transmission,” the petition says.

Further, according to the petitioner, Aadhaar’s objective of creating a universal database would lead to infringement of “fundamental and core private rights” of citizens. 

Subramanium submitted that the standing committee chairman Yashwant Sinha had written a detailed statement cautioning the UPA government against the scheme. He said that UK, Australia and some European countries have scrapped similar schemes because of the fear of violation of privacy.

The petition states that while UID enrolment form itself does not seek information concerning ones’ religion, the same is easily discernable from a person’s name. Further, the application form of certain banks like the State Bank of India require a client to disclose information such as caste, income and religion.

This enables anyone having access to UID database to profile the population on the basis of any of the identity traits, contends the petitioner.

After hearing Mr. Gopal Subramanium, the Bench consisting of Chief Justice H.L. Dattu and Justice A.K. Sikri sought to know the government’s stand from Solicitor General Ranjit Kumar . He said he needed two weeks to clarify the official stand, whereupon the Bench posted the matter for further consideration on February 13.