Aadhaar and privacy

Many arguments for making use of Aadhaar mandatory may be convincing, but after several executive orders mandating its linking to PAN cards for income-tax verification and eliminating duplication in the loose PAN card system, the Centre is hard-pressed to convince the Supreme Court that all its actions are honourable, despite the court’s serious reservations on the constitutional validity of the universal identity database system. Where the arguments seem to run into a grey area, fundamental to the very concept of national identity cards, is an individual’s right to privacy. How right is the Centre to argue that a person has no right to keep private his biometric data like fingerprints is open to question.

The balance of arguments favouring a central ID system may just about outweigh objections, but not all of them can be brushed aside as there are serious concerns about this national database’s security. The leaks that emerged in the public domain, particularly from Aadhaar numbers used to access social benefits, prove that security is not as watertight as the executive thinks. Aadhaar has saved the government huge sums by filtering out duplication in PAN cards by which taxes were avoided. The claim that there has been no duplication in 113.7 crore Aadhaar cards must be verified, and if it is proven to be so, we should be very proud of such a foolproof system.

Government departments are, however, being blamed for the leaks, which shows that not all the fears of Aadhaar’s critics are misplaced. The key question to address is, of course, whether Aadhaar overrules the right to privacy.