Jaideep Deogharia | TNN | Apr 24, 2017, 10.39 AM IS
RANCHI: The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has ruled out any action against the directorate of social security in Jharkhand after Aadhaar details of 14 lakh pensioners were posted on the department's official website.
The UIDAI is the only agency authorised under the Aadhaar Act 2016 to lodge an FIR in case of disclosure of personal or biometric information of any individual related to Aadhaar.
In a serious lapse, the directorate of social security, under the Jharkhand government's department of women and child development and social security, had uploaded the details of pensioners -- including Aadhaar numbers, bank account numbers, caste details and names of banks where pension gets credited -- on its website. The information was frozen on the intervening night of Saturday and Sunday after some of the details were posted on social media.
Talking about the privacy breach, assistant director general UIDAI, Jharkhand, Sunil Prasad, said the mistake was inadvertent and had been corrected as soon as it was brought to the department's notice. "We informed the department to take corrective steps and the information related to pensioners available on open platform was closed to access. Now, account-holders will need to log in to their personal accounts to access the details," he said.
How the account-holders were handed over their user-IDs and passwords overnight, however, remains a mystery.
Mukhmeet Singh Bhatia, principal secretary of the department of women and child development and social security, said the user-ID and password have been created for department officials for internal monitoring. "As far as pensioners are concerned, they get SMS alert on their mobile phones whenever pension is credited to their bank accounts," he said.
Bhatia, however, refused to comment on why the Aadhaar details or account numbers of pensioners were made available online.
This is not the first time such a breach has happened in Jharkhand. In March, cricketer Mahendra Singh Dhoni's Aadhaar details were posted on social media.
Following a tweet by Dhoni's wife Sakshi, Union IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad promised action and the Ranchi-based agency, which had procured the cricketer's details and posted the information on social media, was blacklisted for 10 years.