March 26, 2014 12:01:41 AM | By FPJ Bureau
Finance Minister P Chidambaram had called it a game changer. Well, that game changer has been delivered yet another body blow by the highest court in the land. That is what happens when you undertake to spend thousands of crores of taxpayers’ rupees without thinking through all the pluses and minuses of a particular project. Yes, the Aadhaar card is no longer worth the paper it is printed on.
A two-member bench of the Supreme Court on Monday ordered that these cards cannot be used to deny citizens benefits under various welfare schemes. The Unique Identification Authority of India has also been ordered not to share the biometrics and other relevant data collected by it with the crime investigation agencies.
The data is to be used only for `civilian and non-forensic purposes.’ In this case, the UIDAI had appealed against a lower court order in Goa, which had directed it to provide the CBI relevant data collected in the state to help the investigating agency solve the case of a gang-rape of a seven year-old girl last year.
The CBI wanted to match the fingerprints lifted from the crime scene. On appeal, the Bombay High Court declined to reverse the Goa court order, forcing the UIDAI to go to the Apex Court. It was obligatory on the Aadhaar agency to protect the privacy of card-holders.
It had publicly committed to do so when concerns were raised about citizen privacy at the time the proposal to issue such cards was first mooted. But that does not still answer the question about the usefulness of the Aadhaar card. Because it was issued to all comers without even a preliminary check about the information furnished, its validity was suspect.
Foreign nationals who had entered into the country illegally were bound to misuse it for wrongly claiming Indian citizenship. Linking the card to the provision of various social security schemes was bound to prove wasteful. Making it mandatory for banks to rely on these cards for opening bank accounts was fraught with potential frauds.
The point is that there was total confusion as to what the card was supposed to achieve. In fact, when the then Home Minister P Chidambaram resisted the Aadhaar scheme, the Prime Minister had to intervene, not because he himself was convinced about its uses, but because the high-profile Nandan Nilekani was keen to implement the project.
It was Nilekani’s idea all right, though he himself was not clear as to how duplicating the work of arming Indians with ID cards would help when the same job was being done by the National Population Registry. As a compromise, the Aadhaar cards were given to half of the population, while the NPR scheme was universally extended to all Indians.
Duplication entailed the loss of thousands of crores of taxpayers’ money. Besides, the Aadhaar card lacked the statutory backing, making its use difficult for various schemes.
Even the banks cannot be made to rely on it to open accounts. However, now that tens of crores of cards have been issued, it is incumbent upon the government to gainfully use them, say, for eliminating leakages in various welfare schemes, or even for crime prevention and detection while protecting citizen privacy.
For that to happen, spurious cards made on the basis of wrong information must be eliminated. Otherwise, the validity of these cards will remain suspect.