By The New Indian Express
Published: 26th March 2014 06:00 AM
Last Updated: 26th March 2014 01:45 AM
The Supreme Court’s order delinking the Aadhaar card from government schemes and subsidies has knocked the bottom out of one of the UPA government’s important programmes. The court has also asked the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) not to share biometric and other personal information it has gathered with anyone without the permission of the person concerned. Together they constitute a body blow to the government that spent a colossal sum to make and distribute Aadhaar cards. The unique identification scheme was a fancy idea to provide every citizen a number so that it would serve a variety of purposes from identification to entitlement.
The authority had claimed that the identity cards could not be duplicated as they contained biometric details of the persons concerned. When the Aadhaar card was made mandatory for certain entitlements like subsidy on cooking gas cylinders, it was revealed how ill-prepared the government was. The implementation created utter confusion from which there was no escape. It was a blessing in disguise that the apex court intervened and virtually de-legitimised the card. The case of the unique identification number has been proved worse. The government forgot that building a system that could search latent fingerprints wasn’t within the constitutional and legal mandate and scope of UIDAI. Media organisations have of late exposed how officials in charge of UIDAI have been selling the cards for money. They did not even insist on biometric details to produce the cards for those who could pay. Worse, even foreign nationals like Nepalis and Bangladeshis were able to get unique identity cards made in their names. Could anything be more farcical than this?
All this shows that both the Aadhaar and the unique identity card schemes have flopped. The government is mainly to blame, as it had not given adequate thought about their implementation before they were launched. Now it is too late for the UPA government to do anything about them. It should keep the programmes in hold so that the next government can take a call on them.