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Economic Times
You can check if your PAN is linked to Aadhaar by logging into your ... to the ITR you have filed if you link your PAN with Aadhaar after August 31.
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Economic Times
NEW DELHI: Amidst the debate on privacy and Aadhaar after the Supreme Court judgement, five BJP states have passed own Aadhaar acts while 15 ...
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Economic Times
NEW DELHI: The UIDAI today rejected charges that foreign firms were accessing sensitive data, saying no Aadhaar information has ever been stored ...
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The Hindu
The UAE-based Pravasi Bandhu Trust has urged the Centre to make Aadhaar available for all citizens, including Non-Resident Indians (NRIs).
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Pune Mirror
Many citizens of this country must have their own Aadhaar card stories to tell. I heard a few in the queues in which I stood even as the nine-judge ...
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Times of India
Cross Match Technology, the company involved in the latest WikiLeaks-Aadhaar controversy, has denied all allegations made in media reports.
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Firstpost
The first task, of getting a SIM card for his mobile phone, itself proved to be difficult as the carrier insisted on a copy of the Aadhaar card. A relative ...
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Times of India
BENGALURU: The Karnataka government has made Aadhaar card mandatory for those going on the annual Char Dham pilgrimage (holy thirth yatra) ...
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Thursday, August 31, 2017
11937 - Aadhaar Articles Dated 31st August 2017
11936 - THE AADHAAR GAME - Pune Mirror
Pune Mirror | Updated: Aug 31, 2017, 02.30 AM IST
By: Shanta Gokhale
How the government worked on breaking resistance
Is Aadhaar meant for identity or identification?
Is it voluntary or mandatory?
Many citizens of this country must have their own Aadhaar card stories to tell. I heard a few in the queues in which I stood even as the nine-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court was in the process of deciding its future, depending on whether it held privacy to be a fundamental right or not. Its clear-eyed ruling with multiple progressive applications was greeted by bold headlines and hosannas. But, ignominiously for me, my Aadhaar story had ended the day before.
My resistance to Aadhaar was prompted by the State speaking in two tongues. While one tongue said Aadhaar was voluntary, the other, using agencies like banks, mobile phone providers and the income-tax department, was saying it was mandatory.
I suspected the State’s motives. Dr Usha Ramanathan, in her spirited Sunday interview in Mumbai Mirror, confirmed the suspicion. Calling a spade a spade, she faulted the State for its two-facedness. She said its strategy was coercion, not compulsion; and Aadhaar was not a document for identity but for identification. She also said we had forgotten the need for civil disobedience in the face of a bad law and become “an obedient and compliant population.” True. To our shame, the present government with its hordes has succeeded in making us feel that obedience to its every diktat is patriotism.
A close relation, an enthusiastic member of the Obedience & Compulsion brigade, demanded angrily why I should put myself above the millions who had got Aadhaars as soon as the government had said, go get. Sakshi Maharaj too asked, equally angrily, “Who is right? Crores of people who see god in Ram Rahim or that girl who filed a complaint?”
In our majoritarian State, right and wrong is a question of numbers. Fortunately, the judiciary supports the individual. Like “that girl”.
With all that, my Aadhaar-resistance crumbled as the last date for filing incometax returns approached. Filing returns is an annual must, however meagre my income. My CA said she couldn’t file them without an Aadhaar number. I said defiantly, file them all the same. What will the State do? Jail me for being law-abiding? She sighed. Returns could only be filed online and the programme automatically blocked those that were not linked to Aadhaar. I raved and ranted, but yielded. Technology, in the aid of a coercive State, brought me to my knees. So began five days of frustration, days I could have spent watching dance or hearing music or seeing a play or attending a talk. Here’s an account of how they went, in point form.
Day One: Identify and visit nearest Aadhaar centre. Centre closed.
Day Two: Hunt for a centre that is open. Find one in Lower Parel, Mumbai. Nobody answers the phone. Go personally. It is working. “Come tomorrow. Two of our machines are down today.”
Day Three: Go to centre at previous day’s time. “This is the wrong time. Come between eight and nine in the morning.”
Day Four: Arrive at eight. “Time is right. But we only give 100 tokens. Quota finished.” But a kind spirit whispers, “Senior citizens can come in the afternoon. Ask them.” Yes, it’s true.
Day Five: Afternoon. Am given a form to fill. Try to go indoors to sit down and fill it. Stopped by sentry. “Stand in the queue.” Fill the form standing? Allowed in ungraciously. Token numbers are being called out. They stop at 196. I am 215. The clock creeps to 5.30 pm. Sentry enters. “Go to 1st floor, but don’t say I sent you”.
We are thieves. We sneak in. There’s a melee in the narrow space upstairs. The hard-worked men and women in the cubicles are restless. It is nearly pack-up time. People begin to push. I don’t know how to push. Never done it before. Gradually, the crowd clears. I face a grumbling woman. I am fingerprinted like a criminal. I have finally enrolled for Aadhaar. I walk out feeling deeply humiliated. The State has arranged to make me feel that way.
On Sunday, the Maharashtra Government’s feel-free-to-make-noise sop kicks in. A bunch of Ganapati bhakts has engaged eight booming drums and one raucous synthesiser to provide non-stop music for them to dance to. Their bhaktifilled dance hall is the road before our house. The mayhem lasts for an hour. Ganapati Bappa Morya!
The silver lining to the week is PV Sindhu’s incredible match against Japan’s Nozomi Okuhara. Sindhu shines. Momentarily, we forget our Ram Rahims, Sakshi Maharajs and citizen-unfriendly governments. We are proud.
♦ Liked/hated her column? Write to Shanta Gokhale at punemirror.feedback@gmail.com
11935 - The good and the bad of the privacy ruling - Live Mint
Much as I enjoyed reading the Supreme Court’s judgement affirming privacy as a fundamental right, I have some misgivings about the direction down which it is pointing us
26th August 2017
While the Supreme Court judges seem to understand the benefits that big data can bring us, they appear, at the same time, ignorant of the chilling effect that a strict notice and consent-based framework can have on these business models. Photo: Mint
One of the pleasures of being a lawyer in a vibrant common law jurisdiction is that every once in a while the system spits out a decision so artfully crafted and filled with nuance and meaning that it is a sheer joy to read. Few decisions in recent memory are better exemplars of this than the recent decision of the Supreme Court in Puttuswamy v. Union of India, affirming the fundamental right to privacy.
The system of common law is based on precedent. Judges are bound to consider past judgments and apply them to disputes that come before them in the future. They are only permitted to diverge the chain of historical decisions if it is possible to sufficiently distinguish—in fact or principle—from the available precedents. Our law is, therefore, not so much a monolith handed to us by our founding fathers as an edifice constructed brick-by-brick through an incremental series of decisions—each one based on the judgements that preceded it but in aggregate a composite, well-integrated whole. Common law takes shape in this manner, organically evolving to accommodate new technologies and social mores while remaining consistent with the past from which it arose.
The fundamental right to privacy has been developed by the courts in this manner for over 60 years. The reason the Supreme Court had to take the effort to gather nine judges together to rule on whether or not we have a fundamental right to privacy was because of a minor inconsistency that had crept into the chain of decisions over 50 years ago and remained, till last Friday, unresolved.
It all began when the attorney general of India, while defending the Aadhaar project, argued that the Constitution does not include within it a fundamental right to privacy. He based his conclusion on two cases decided by the Supreme Court—one, MP Sharma v. Satish Chandra, decided by an eight-judge bench in 1954 and the other, Kharak Singh v. State of Uttar Pradesh, by six judges in 1962. Both cases had held, under different circumstances, that the Constitution of India does not specifically protect the right to privacy. In the 55 years that have passed since these cases were decided, there hasn’t been a larger bench of Supreme Court that has considered this issue, and therefore, by sheer weight of numbers, these judgements bound us. It would take nine judges to set this straight.
When you get into the weeds, MP Sharma dealt with a completely unrelated issue—the right against self-incrimination. While it did mention the right to privacy in passing, these comments were stray observations at best. Kharak Singh, on the other hand, was a confusing decision that held, on the one hand, that the intrusion into a person’s home is a violation of liberty (relying on a US judgement on the right to privacy), but on the other hand went on to say that there was no right to privacy contained in our Constitution.
But since these were eight- and six-judge benches of the Supreme Court, every subsequent court had to deal with this confusion as best they could. In the next case, Gobind v. State of Madhya Pradesh, a three-judge bench, mindful of its inability to overturn a judgment of a larger bench, skirted around the inconsistency by “assuming” that the right to privacy was protected under the Constitution—relying on the first part of the Kharak Singh judgement without specifically calling out its inconsistency with the second. Once Gobind hacked a pathway through this thicket, many smaller benches followed suit, building on these principles to articulate a fundamental right to privacy in the context of medical privacy, matrimonial privacy, reputational privacy, privacy of sexual orientation and many more. But we always knew that this jurisprudence, built as it had been on uncertain foundations, was susceptible to challenge.
The task before the nine-judge bench in Puttuswamy v. Union of India was to settle the law once and for all. They did so emphatically—overruling both MP Singh and Kharak Singh to the extent that they had held that there was no fundamental right to privacy. They also overruled additional district magistrate (ADM) Jabalpur—a decision that allowed for fundamental rights to be suspended during an Emergency and called into question the judicial reasoning in the Naz Foundation case that implied that the “minuscule minority” LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) community was not entitled to the right to privacy. They connected our privacy jurisprudence over the years with our international commitments and established our conformity with comparative laws around the world.
In doing so, they affirmed the precedential basis of every single privacy judgement in our judicial history, making it clear that even without an express fundamental right to privacy, we are entitled to enjoy the right as it is inherent in our right to liberty and dignity.
Much as I enjoyed reading the judgement, I have some misgivings about the direction down which it is pointing us. I am concerned that the tests they have articulated and the constraints they have imposed could well have a chilling effect on our ability to get the most out of modern technology. While the opinions of both justice D.Y. Chandrachud and justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul speak of the need to balance the individual’s right to privacy with the benefits of data mining and big data, they go on to suggest a framework to protect individual autonomy based solely on consent. While they seem to understand the benefits that big data can bring us, they appear, at the same time, ignorant of the chilling effect that a strict notice and consent-based framework can have on these business models.
Just as the strength of the common law system comes from the solid foundations on which it is based, its weakness is that it is structurally designed to build only on past decisions. Since they are required to decide solely based on historical thought processes, they are incapable of finding solutions for a future untethered to the past. This is why a common law judiciary is so bad at dealing with disruption.
We are currently in the midst of a period of unprecedented disruptive change. Where it was once sufficient to secure personal privacy by limiting the collection of data, in the face of a rapidly increasing number of devices and systems that constantly collect information from us in ways that we cannot completely comprehend, consented collection is completely infeasible. We are also beneficiaries of new technologies that leverage the power of data offering us facilities and services that enhance our quality of life. Most of these new technologies rely on big data and machine learning—which in turn depend on access to large data sets in order to do their magic. Requiring data controllers to restrict themselves by proportionality and purpose could have a chilling effect on these new business models.
Regulators around the world have begun to discard the principle of notice and consent that guided their actions for over three decades. They have, instead, begun to rely on models such as accountability to address the challenges of a disruptive future. If the nine judges who have done such an exemplary job of righting the mistakes of the past could have only shifted perspective while legislating for the future, we’d have got a judgement that was truly perfect by every measure.
Rahul Matthan is a partner at Trilegal. Ex Machina is a column on technology, law and everything in between.
His Twitter handle is @matthan
First Published: Sat, Aug 26 2017. 01 00 AM IST
11934 - RTI activist says Aadhaar contract gave foreign firms access to unencrypted data - TNN
Chethan Kumar | TNN | Aug 30, 2017, 02:40 IST
HIGHLIGHTS
- Contracts signed with foreign firms by UIDAI show that they got “full access” to classified data
- This was revealed through an RTI application filed by Bengaluru-based Col Matthew Thomas
BENGALURU: Contrary to the Centre's claims, contracts signed with foreign firms by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), custodian of Aadhaar data, show that they got "full access" to classified data including fingerprints, iris scan info, and personal information like date of birth, address and mobile number of the applicants. They were also allowed to store the data for seven years.
This was revealed through an RTI application filed by Bengaluru-based Col Matthew Thomas, one of the petitioners in the right to privacy case currently being heard in Supreme Court.
The RTI reply showed that the nature of the contracts contradicted UIDAI's statements that no private entity had access to unencrypted Aadhaar data. The contract with one of the biometric service providers (BSPs), L-1 Identity Solutions Operating Co Pvt Ltd, headquartered in US, says that the company was given Aadhaar data access "as part of its job". (L-1 has been taken over by French transnational Safran Group). Morpho and Accenture Services Pvt Ltd are two other firms that were given identical contracts with two year (2010 to 2012) Aadhaar data access.
Clause 15.1 of the contract, titled 'Data and Hardware', says that the firm, by virtue of the contract "may have access to personal data of the purchaser (UID), and/or a third party or any resident of India..." Further, Clause 3, which deals with privacy, says that the BSP could "collect, use, transfer, store and process the data". It also says that the BSP shall process all personal data in accordance with applicable law and regulation and should not disclose such information. The contract, however, does not define 'personal data'.
An advocate familiar with the subject explained: "If the contract does not define it, then we must go by the definitions given by UIDAI as part of the project." According to UIDAI, personal data includes both biometric (fingerprints and iris) and demographic data (name, date of birth, address, mobile number). The latter may also include bank details, licence number, PAN number, passport number and other information furnished as part of KYC.
Another clause in the contract says that the firm should maintain the biometric template created by it and that in the event of termination or expiry of contract, it "shall transfer all the proprietary templates to UIDAI". Col Thomas says: "If the firms did not have the biometric data, what were they expected to transfer? Why can't the UIDAI just come out in the open with all the contract details?" Though UIDAI maintained that it has purchased the software and hardware to roll out the Adhaar programme, the contracts show that the BSPs were responsible for providing hardware for the first one crore enrolments.
TOP COMMENT
so Aadhar is tool prepared for selling 1ndia on whole sale rate at international market by compromising country''s wealth.
So we are sold.. isn;t it.?
Be U
A cyber expert said: "If the hardware is also installed by the firms, then there must have been thorough checking to see if they contained anything that could steal data." UIDAI has said that no data ever left its servers and premises and every bit of information is safe and secure.
Ravi Visvesvaraya Prasad, a telecom and IT expert, said, "One cannot check for duplication without having raw data. If foreign firms had access to such data, as is clear by the language in the contract, it is potentially dangerous and needs to be looked into."
11933 - Deadline for mandatory Aadhaar to avail social benefits extended to December 31: Govt to SC - TNN
TNN | Updated: Aug 30, 2017, 14:44 IST
HIGHLIGHTS
- The earlier deadline for mandatory Aadhaar to avail social benefits was September 30
- The Centre extended the deadline after petitioners sought an early hearing on pleas challenging Aadhaar's validity
- The SC agreed to list these petitions for hearing for the first week of November.
NEW DELHI: The Centre told the Supreme Court (SC) on Wednesday that it will extend the deadline for mandatory Aadhaar to avail social benefits to December 31 from the earlier September 30.
Attorney General (AG) K K Venugopal, on the Centre's behalf, made this statement to a Supreme Court bench when petitioners sought an early hearing on pleas challenging Aadhaar's validity, following last week's top court judgment declaring privacy a fundamental right.
As for the petitions challenging Aadhaar, the SC agreed to list them for hearing in the first week of November.
The AG, in fact, requested the SC bench - headed by chief justice Dipak Mishra - to list these petitions before a 5-judge Constitution bench rather than a 3-judge one.
TOP COMMENT
A vindictive Govt. Not willing to address people''s apprehension. We were loving Modiji. Now we fear Modiji. Modiji cant claim a loveable leader rather a leader to whom voters, citizens, administrato... Read More
Tusarkanta Mohanty
On June 27, the deadline for mandatory Aadhaar for social benefits was extended to September 30 from June 30. At the time, the SC also said there will be no freeze on the government notification that makes Aadhaar mandatory for social benefit schemes. The top court was hearing a petition that expressed "apprehension" that students would be deprive of mid-day meals if Aadhaar is made mandatory.
"No order can be passed just on the basis of apprehension," the SC said on June 27.
Wednesday, August 30, 2017
11932 - Aadhaar: What are the pending cases before the Supreme Court? - Indian Express
A look at the various PILs pending before the Supreme Court in matters related to the mandatory possession of Aadhaar.
Written by Sonakshi Awasthi | New Delhi | Published:May 31, 2017 11:58 am
We take a look at the pending Aadhaar cases before the Supreme Court.
With reports of various organisations and government agencies making private details of individuals such as biometrics and bank account details public, a set of Public Interest Litigations have been filed in the Supreme Court urging it to intervene and stop the government from mandating the compulsory possession of Aadhaar.
The government’s decision of making Aadhaar compulsory, petitioners say, was in effect contempt of the Supreme Court’s October 2015 order which explicitly stated voluntary possession of an Aadhaar by an individual.
Here’s a look at the different cases related to Aadhaar that are pending before the Supreme Court:
Petitions against making Aadhaar mandatory for social welfare schemes:
Shantha Sinha & Anr. v. Union of India (W.P. (C) 342/2017)
Taken up before the Supreme Court on May 19, 2017, the petition filed is against the notifications in making Aadhaar mandatory. Senior counsel Shyam Divan on behalf of the petitioner requested the Court for an interim stay on the June 30 deadline (explained below) on making Aadhaar mandatory for all individuals to which the Supreme Court refrained and listed all interim relief matters to be heard on June 27, 2017.
Taken up before the Supreme Court on May 19, 2017, the petition filed is against the notifications in making Aadhaar mandatory. Senior counsel Shyam Divan on behalf of the petitioner requested the Court for an interim stay on the June 30 deadline (explained below) on making Aadhaar mandatory for all individuals to which the Supreme Court refrained and listed all interim relief matters to be heard on June 27, 2017.
Pan card and Income Tax (Section 139AA):
Binoy Visman v. Union of India (WP(C) 247/2017) and S.G. Vombatkere & Anr. v. Union of India (W.P.(C) 277/2017)
Senior Counsels Arvind Datar representing the petitioner in Binoy Visman and Shyam Divan on behalf of the petitioner in the latter, added another case to the list of pending cases in the Aadhaar matter on April 13, 2017 challenging Section 139AA of the Income Tax Act, 1961 introduced by the Finance Act, 2017.
The said section mandates a person to link his Aadhaar number to his Permanent Account Number (PAN) card as well as quote the Aadhaar number while filing one’s income tax returns.
The urgency to bring the matter to the attention of the court is due to the first line mentioned in the Act, “Every person who is eligible to obtain Aadhaar number shall, on or after the 1st day of July, 2017, quote Aadhaar number-…”
At the outset, Divan distilled the matter excluding the challenges to privacy and constitutionality of the Aadhar Act, circling the pending Aadhar cases, from the hearing.
Challenging Article 14 (equality before law) and Article 19(g) (part of fundamental rights giving rights to individuals to practice free trade and profession) of the Indian Constitution, Divan concluded his arguments focusing on the altered “relationship of Republic of India with its citizens”..” Pointing out how providing of proof of identification and address of individuals to private parties and not government officials is a violation of rights. Further, he focused on how the Registrar authorized by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) could be a bank, a public sector employee and any other agency having no privity with the Government. Therefore, forcing the individuals to reveal their personal information to a third party is a violation of Article 19(g) of the Constitution. Divan concluded his arguments praying a blanket stay on Section 139AA or a coercion-free system if the section comes into force. He further requested the court to not invalidate the PAN card in case Aadhaar is linked to an individual.
The Court on hearing both the Counsels on behalf of the petitioner, Datar and Divan and the respondent, Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi representing the government for continuous six days, reserved the order on May 4, 2017.
The Supreme Court on May 19, 2017 refrained to grant an interim stay on the June 30 deadline to link all individuals to Aadhaar.
Infringement of Right to Privacy (Article 21):
Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) & Another v. Union of India (WP(C) 494/2012
All of the 22 Aadhaar matters are linked to the above mentioned case in the Supreme Court. The case is currently being heard by a constitutional bench headed by Chief Justice of India JS Khehar. In August 2015, a three-judge bench passed an order clearly stating that Aadhaar is voluntary and no citizen can be denied benefits otherwise entitled to them for not obtaining an Aadhaar card. The top court also ordered the government to broadcast the same by means of electronic and print media, radio and television. The Aadhaar card, it said, cannot be used for any purpose other than PDS.
“The Unique Identification Number or the Aadhaar card will not be used by the respondents for any purpose other than the PDS Scheme and in particular for the purpose of distribution of foodgrains, etc. and cooking fuel, such as kerosene. The Aadhaar card may also be used for the purpose of the LPG Distribution Scheme.”
Later in October that year, it further allowed the use of Aadhaar for Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGA), the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana, pensions by central and state governments, and the Employees’ Provident Fund scheme.
It is from this October date that various contempts of the order and violations of the directions were reported and individuals were mandated to provide Aadhaar number for applying for pre metric, post metric and merit based scholarships by the Ministry of Minority Affairs. Such violations constantly took place and a list of cases tagged themselves to the above mentioned matter.
Aadhar Act passed as a Money Bill:
Jairam Ramesh v. Union of India (W.P.(C) 231/2016)
In March 2016, Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan allowed the passage of the Aadhar Act, 2016 as a money bill, amid protests by the Opposition. Although Article 110 sub-clause (3) of the Indian Constitution explicitly states that the decision of the Lok Sabha Speaker in matters of whether a bill is a money bill or not “shall be final”, former Union minister Jairam Ramesh filed a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) against the government on passing the Aadhar Act as a money bill without consulting the Rajya Sabha.
A money bill consists of seven provisions provided in Article 110(1) of the Constitution including regulation of tax and borrowing by the government, custody of consolidated funds of India and payments and withdrawals from the fund, appopraition of money out of the consolidated fund, declaring the expenditure charged on the consolidated fund and its increase and receipt of money on account of the consolidated fund.
The petitioners argued that the “Aadhaar Act did not comprise solely of management of funds of the Consolidated Fund of India, instead it was only a part of the Bill that included amongst other things, the roles and responsibilities of enrollment agencies, requesting entities, and authentication agencies, and the information to be given to users,” Legally India reported. The matter is pending before the court and is awaiting trial where the respondents are seeking judicial review of the Aadhaar Act passed as a money bill passed by the Lok Sabha Speaker and challenging validity of whether the Speaker’s decision is “final”.
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11931 - ADRIFT WITHOUT THE AADHAAR CARD - Pune Mirror
By Gouri Dange, Pune Mirror | Updated: Aug 29, 2017, 02.30 AM IST
Those who came in late are sentenced to being Niraadhaar
Those of us who were in on the early stampede for the Aadhaar card and got this tremendous sense of personal and national achievement once it came into our anxious, waiting hands, we must consider ourselves lucky. I’ve been watching just one young Indian national and her two kids struggling to get one, and it would have been a funny story if it wasn’t so aggravating.
And this is not about the fundamental questions and faults of the scheme itself. There are many cogent and uncomfortable questionings of the whole UIDAI and its Aadhaar scheme by many well-qualified-to-speak people, and there have been no satisfactory answers.
What we are talking about here, however, is a citizen who accepts that she needs to get herself and her kids the A-card, and is trying systematically to go about doing just that. She has just returned from a long stint in an African country, and is re-rooting back in India. It was not possible to get the whole thing going when she came here on brief vacations.
Some of us ‘lucky’ ones got to do our own running around and deciphering right at the very beginning. Some building societies were organised enough to get a person with the Aadhaar machine right at their doorstep, dedicated to just the residents of the place. But now, the random and lone citizens stumbling about to get the coveted card in place, have a deliciously absurd time.
Here’s just one case, of a young educated woman with a new job and two small kids. Over the last two months, in pursuit of the Aadhaar card, she has gone online, made calls, taken unpaid leave from a new job, planted her kids on someone so that she can go on this wild goose chase, and always come away unattended. The big card centre near her home in Bavdhan is closed indefinitely; there are people in there, very polite, but with no particular explanation why their centre has gone dead. They kindly point her to the Fergusson College Road centre, where she comes out with a similar no-go experience. These people point her to the Law College Road one, who cannot do it (note, that all of this takes half a working day easily in just the coming going and collection of ‘no’. The Laxmi Road centre, she is told, has closed down. And agent somewhere near Poona College tells her that his system is down and there is no saying when it will be up and running again. Same thing with a centre in Kothrud — non-operational indefinitely, she was told, once she reached there.
She then calls up a nagar sevak type, who asks her to come to his office and take his visiting card and present it to the Balewadi Aadhaar Centre. He gives her a phone number and is told that she must call beforehand, as there is a waiting list for the waiting list at the Balewadi centre. She does this, and is told by Balewadi to come on a Thursday at 4.30 pm. A proper appointment. Ah, light at the end of the tunnel. Another half-day without pay, and off she goes, after making arrangements for the kids to be looked after. Only to be told at Balewadi (after being given that appointment hardly five days earlier) that their “service provider didn’t file IT returns so all applications made from his centre are getting rejected”. Huh? Is all that she could manage to say, and return home with a new lead: Aundgaon jao, madam. Nakki milel. Monday la.
(Now all these troubles seem like nothing compared to recent events at Chandigarh and Panchkula, and maybe we should stop cribbing and daily go down on our knees and give thanks that we have the opportunity to run from pillar to post chasing the Holy Grail without being molested, murdered, marauded or manhandled. Always, for us in this new India, the cold comfort of being better off than someone and someplace else.)
One of the things perhaps she could do, after Aadhaar from Aundhgaon turns out to be a non-operational project, is do her homework on which city or state has its act slightly together, and take a non-paid vacation (as opposed to single-day leaves without pay) and apply for the card in such a place, if it exists? Or would that be yet another exercise in futility, one wonders.
If an educated woman with the ability to take herself hither and yon (albeit at some cost) is given such a run around, we can imagine what the less fortunate must be dealing with. Time to sing that line from the famous Asha Bhonsle Marathi song Jivalagaa: “Niraadhar mi, mi vanavaasi”. (I am without support, and shut out in the cold.)
11930 - Will the Aadhaar Act Withstand a Constitutional Challenge? - The Wire
BY PRASHANT REDDY T ON 29/08/2017 • 4 COMMENTS
Is it time to change tactics with regard to privacy and Aadhaar? It seems likely that the Act will be upheld as constitutional, when looked at whether it falls foul of our fundamental right to privacy.
Is the Supreme Court is going to strike down the Aadhaar Act, 2016 for violating the fundamental right to privacy? Credit: Reuters
Now that a bench of nine judges of the Supreme Court have decided, in the case of Justice Puttaswamy v. Union of India, that Indians have a fundamental right to privacy, the next big question is whether the Supreme Court is going to strike down the Aadhaar Act for violating that right. This is going to be a closely watched case because privacy has been at the centre of the debate against Aadhaar.
Unlike other Aadhaar sceptics, I do not think privacy is the biggest problem with Aadhaar. In fact, given the prevalent situation in India, I would go as far to say that Aadhaar hardly worsens the privacy rights of the citizen vis-à-vis the state. As things stand today, the bureaucracy and police can enter your house to conduct search and seizure, on the pretext of curbing tax evasion, money laundering or copyright infringement without requiring search warrants from judges. In the context of income tax raids, this used to mean that an officer at the level of principal commissioner could sanction raids. The Finance Act, 2017, has diluted even this perfunctory safeguard to allow even director level officers to sanction raids, leading to concerns of a ‘raid raj’.
Surprisingly, the entire public discourse on the privacy issue has revolved around the issue of “data” and “information”. Given the nature of privacy, it is necessary to strive for poorna privacy rather than seek some half-baked measures to protect our data while turning a blind eye to the state storming into our houses without even the fig leaf of a judicial warrant.
The silence of the privacy debate on this issue is intriguing since the Modi government, like its predecessors in the Congress, has used the Income Tax Department & Enforcement Directorate as its instrument of choice to intimidate the opposition and the media .
The argument about bodily integrity
Regarding the issue of the Aadhaar Act and whether it falls foul of the fundamental right to privacy as outlined in the Puttaswamy case, the petitioners are likely to take three main arguments.
The first argument is likely that the act of collecting fingerprints and iris scans of citizens, violates their bodily integrity. Senior advocate Shyam Divan has reportedly argued before the court: “My fingerprints and iris are my own. As far as I am concerned, the state cannot take away my body”. In his written submissions, he reportedly stated, “A statutory provision that completely takes away the voluntary nature of Aadhaar and compels expropriation of a person’s finger prints and iris scan is per se violative of Article 21. In any event, such coercion cannot be imposed on legitimate tax payers and assessees who are otherwise willing to and pay income tax. There is no concept of eminent domain of the state qua a person and his body.” As per Divan’s line of argument, the action of collecting these fingerprints and iris scans is violating a citizen’s bodily integrity.
The Supreme Court, in Puttaswamy v. Union of India, has held that the fundamental right to privacy extends to preserving bodily integrity.
However, the problem with Divan’s argument is that he misunderstands the nature of the technology. A biometric scan of a fingerprint or the iris is nothing but a high-quality photograph that can be used by a computer program to identify a person according to some unique markers. The state is not “expropriating” any part of the body. Very soon, the state will be able to use similar technology to identify people according to their facial photographs. China is already doing it and Facebook’s facial recognition technology is astoundingly accurate.
The natural consequence of accepting Divan’s argument against biometric scans is that even a facial photograph will have to be held as violating a citizen’s bodily integrity. That is a prima facie absurd outcome.
Ignoring for a minute the consequentialist line of reasoning and tackling the issue from the perspective of the bodily integrity argument, I would argue that the bodily integrity argument is premised on coercive actions of the state wherein the law prevents a citizen from controlling their body and its functions. Abortion rights and strip searches fall within the class of acts that would violate bodily integrity. High quality photographs of either fingerprints or the face do not violate the bodily integrity of citizens as they do not involve either entering the human body or stopping its movements.
Informational privacy
The second likely argument that will be made by the petitioners is that the Aadhaar Act violated the right to informational self-determination or informational privacy, a right specifically identified and endorsed by the Supreme Court in the Puttaswamy case. As explained by Justice Chandrachud, “Informational control empowers the individual to use privacy as a shield to retain personal control over information pertaining to the person”. As per his opinion, information can be collected subject to three conditions: One, there should be a law authorising the collection of evidence; two, the aim of the law for which information is being collected is reasonable and three, the final condition requires “the means which are adopted by the legislature are proportional to the object and needs sought to be fulfilled by the law”.
Let’s start with the first condition – there should be a law. Although the Aadhaar program initially proceeded without sanction from the parliament, a legislation called the Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial & Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Act, 2016 was enacted by the parliament. The tactics adopted by the government to pass the law as a money bill are questionable and the legality of that issue is a topic for a separate discussion.
The second and third condition requires that the aim of the law for which information is being collected is reasonable and that the means adopted are proportional. To this end, Section 7 of the Act limits the purposes for which Aadhaar can be mandatorily used, to only a “receipt of a subsidy, benefit or service for which the expenditure is incurred from, or the receipt therefrom forms part of, the Consolidated Fund of India”. This falls clearly within the legitimate interests of the state as articulated by Justice Chandrachud in his opinion in the Puttaswamy case where he states, “There is a vital state interest in ensuring that scarce public resources are not dissipated by the diversion of resources to persons who do not qualify as recipients”.
It is a different matter that the government is issuing all kinds of silly notifications making Aadhaar mandatory under different laws. While Section 57 allows the state or private corporations to require Aadhaar authentication pursuant to any law or contract, the only reasonable interpretation of Section 57 is that nobody can mandatorily prescribe Aadhaar pursuant to this provision, since the power to make Aadhaar mandatory exists only in Section 7. All those other notifications are just waiting to be quashed by high courts.
Separate from the above issues, the most important aspect of informational privacy, as understood in other countries, is that citizens know what exactly is happening with their information.
Three provisions of the Aadhaar Act, apart from Section 7, are of particular importance in this regard, since they reflect the central principles of informational privacy as outlined by German courts and subsequently incorporated into the EU Data Protection Directive that is widely accepted as the highest standard of data protection in the world. The relevant provisions in this regard are Sections 3, 28 and 29.
Section 3 of the Aadhaar Act requires the enrolling agency to inform all individuals of the manner in which the information shall be used, the nature of recipients with whom the information is intended to be shared during authentication and the existence of a right to access information records stored with the UIDAI. These principles basically align with the European principles of data protection requiring the citizen to be informed about how their data is to be used by the data collection agency. The only problem with Section 3 is that the regulations drafted by the UIDAI do a poor job of implementing the legislative mandate in Section 3. That, however, is a ground for challenging the constitutionality of the regulations, not the parent legislation.
Sections 28 and 29 of the same legislation guarantee the confidentiality of all the information collected by the UIDAI and prohibits the authority from either sharing the information with any other person or using it for “for any purpose, other than that specified to the individual at the time of submitting any identity information for authentication”.
In sum, the above provisions ensure that the information is collected with consent, is kept confidential and the person will have the right to access their data.
The threat of the surveillance state
The most forceful privacy argument made against Aadhaar is that it will enable the state to mount 360-degree surveillance on a citizen. I think the state already does that through surveillance of our communications and financial records. I doubt whether Aadhaar can provide any more useful information to the state especially since Aadhaar’s design ensures that the UIDAI lacks the details of transactions conducted with the agency requesting authentication, i.e., if a person conducts a financial transaction at the bank and the bank authenticates the identity of the person, the UIDAI will know only the identity of the requesting agency and not details of the financial transaction per se.
In any case, it is important to understand that even from a surveillance perspective, as per Section 33 of the Aadhaar Act, only the joint secretary can request information from the UIDAI.
The joint secretary’s orders can then be reviewed by an oversight committee of senior bureaucrats.
Frankly speaking, this is a hopeless mechanism to ensure accountability because it keeps everything “in-house” but unfortunately it is the Supreme Court which created this framework in the context of phone-tapping in the People’s Union Of Civil Liberties vs Union Of India case. So, it seems unlikely that the Supreme Court will now strike down this mechanism as unconstitutional.
Stronger privacy rights and a tempered Aadhaar program require political and not judicial intervention
One of the rather amazing aspects of the anti-Aadhaar debate is how the privacy concerns being voiced by a relatively small section of the NGO elite has got so much more attention in the media than all the other Aadhaar related issues combined. Since when did privacy become a more important issue than people going hungry because of technological glitches? Perhaps, positioning the challenge as a privacy issue was a strategic call because it would get the attention of the middle class and by extension, the judges of the higher judiciary. But notwithstanding the victory before the nine judges, there is a high probability that the court will uphold the constitutionality of the Aadhaar Act because the privacy argument is a weak one.
Presuming that privacy was always the main concern, I fail to understand how scrapping of Aadhaar will in any way ensure stronger privacy for us when the state can literally barge into your house on the grounds of tax evasion.
If we truly want an effective privacy regime, we need to accept the limitations of judicial review and work towards a political solution that forces the parliament to enact legislation requiring the state’s agents to procure judicial warrants before conducting raids or surveillance and reforming Indian evidence laws to import into the Evidence Act, the ‘fruits of the poisonous tree’ doctrine that automatically disbars evidence got through illegal means. Privacy is the slave of “procedural law” and only the parliament can and should prescribe reasonable procedure, not the judiciary.
Prashant Reddy T. is a an Asst. Professor at NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad.
11929 - How Aadhaar brings India's poor to the mainstream - Khaleej Times
Filed on August 28, 2017
A man gives his thumb impression to withdraw money from a bank using his Aadhaar card in Hyderabad. The last date for taxpayers to link their PAN with Aadhaar remains August 31.
(AFP)
(AFP)
Every month now, the poor make 70 million payments using their Aadhaar identification
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Sunday said Jam (Jan Dhan, Aadhaar and Mobile) trinity has ushered in a social revolution which will eventually bring all Indians into a common financial, economic and digital space, similar to how GST has created a unified market.
"Within reach of the country is what might be called the 1 billion-1 billion-1 billion vision. That is 1 billion unique Aadhaar numbers linked to 1 billion bank accounts and 1 billion mobile phones. Once that is done, all of India can become part of the financial and digital mainstream," he said.
In a Facebook post on the third anniversary of the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY), he said: "Just as GST created one tax, one market, one India, the PMJDY and the Jam revolution can link all Indians into one common financial, economic and digital space. No Indian will be outside the mainstream."
Noting that Jam is nothing short of a social revolution, the finance minister said it offers substantial benefits for government, the economy and especially the poor. Highlighting the benefits, he said the poor will have access to financial services and be cushioned against life's major shocks while government finances will be improved because of the reduced subsidy burden and weeding out of leakages from the system.
Currently, the government makes direct transfer of ?740 billion to the financial accounts of 350 million beneficiaries annually at more than ?60 billion per month. These transfers are made under various government anti-poverty and support schemes such as Pahal, National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, old age pensions and student scholarships, he said.
Talking about linking Aadhaar with bank accounts, the minister said about 524 million unique Aadhaar numbers are linked to 736.2 million accounts in India.
"As a result, the poor are able to make payments electronically. Every month now, about 70 million successful payments are made by the poor using their Aadhaar identification," he said.
Besides, he said, with the launch of Bhim app and the Unified Payments Interface, Jam has become fully operational.
"A secure and seamless digital payments infrastructure has been created so that all Indians, especially the poor, can become part of the digital mainstream," he said.
Jaitley said total PMJDY accounts opened increased from 125.5 million in January 2015 to 295.2 million as of August 16, 2017 while the number of RuPay cards issued increased from 110.8 million to 227.1 million in the same period.
At the same time, the number of rural accounts opened under PMJDY has grown from 75.4 million to 176.4 million and the average balance per account increased from ?837 to ?2,231 as of August 16.
Jaitley said the total balance in beneficiary accounts rose to ?658.44 billion while zero balance accounts declined from 76.81 per cent in September 2014 to 21.41 per cent in August 2017.
He said the government has taken steps to provide security to the poor via life insurance under the Pradhan Mantra Jeevan Jyoti Bima Yojana (PMJJBY) and accident insurance Pradhan Mantra Suraksha Bima Yojana (PMSBY).
As on August 7, total enrolment was 34.6 million under the PMJJBY and 109.6 million under PMSBY, with 40 per cent of the policy holders being women in both the schemes.
PMJDY, launched on August 27, 2014 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, was aimed at providing financial services to the poor. These included opening bank accounts for the poor, giving them electronic means of payment (via RuPay cards) and placing them in a position to avail themselves of credit and insurance.
"The vision underlying it was much broader: nothing short of ending the financial, and hence economic, digital and social exclusion faced by India's poor. India's poor would not only be able to overcome their economic deprivation but they would also become an integral part of the social mainstream," he said.
- PTI
11928 - Jairam Ramesh seeks early hearing on plea challenging Aadhaar Act being passed as money bill - Live Mint
Congress leader Jairam Ramesh approaches Supreme Court, seeks an early hearing in a challenge to the introduction of the Aadhaar Act as a money bill in Parliament
New Delhi: Congress leader Jairam Ramesh on Tuesday approached the Supreme Court, seeking an early hearing in a challenge to the introduction of the Aadhaar Act as a money bill in Parliament.
A bench headed by chief justice Dipak Misra asked Ramesh’s counsel P. Chidambaram to mention the matter again on Friday for consideration.
The Centre’s 12-digit unique identification project, Aadhaar, is again in the limelight since the top court’s landmark ruling on 24 August, deeming privacy as a fundamental right under the Constitution.
The challenge was first brought in April 2016, where the senior Congress leader had challenged Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Act, claiming it to be “unconstitutional” as it was incorrectly introduced as a money bill.
Former attorney general Mukul Rohatgi had earlier told the court that a matter of legislative procedure cannot be challenged in court. Contesting Rohatgi’s views, Chidambaram had said that the ruling of the Speaker was not enough if it was a substantial violation of procedure.
The matter is likely to be taken up on 1 September.
First Published: Tue, Aug 29 2017. 11 56 AM IST
11927 - Would peruse privacy verdict before hearing Aadhaar plea: Supreme Court - Indian Express
The apex court had in February observed that it was "tentatively not convinced" with the grounds taken by Congress leader Jairam Ramesh to challenge the Lok Sabha Speaker's decision to certify the bill to amend Aadhaar law as a money bill.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday said it would first go through the crucial judgement on privacy before taking a call on Congress leader Jairam Ramesh’s challenge to the Lok Sabha Speaker’s decision to certify a bill to amend the Aadhaar law as a money bill.
The plea was mentioned before a bench comprising Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justices P C Pant and D Y Chandrachud for an early hearing, but the apex court said it would first peruse the judgement delivered by its nine-judge constitution bench declaring the right to privacy a fundamental right.
“You mention it on Friday (September 1). We will also read the judgement,” CJI Misra said.
The apex court had in February observed that it was “tentatively not convinced” with the grounds taken by Ramesh to challenge the Lok Sabha Speaker’s decision to certify the bill to amend Aadhaar law as a money bill.
Observing that the issue was “important and serious” and it did not want to take a call on it in haste, the court had told the counsel appearing for Ramesh to prepare his case by taking into account all the objections raised by the Centre.
The Centre had opposed the plea saying that it fulfilled the criteria as the expenditure for the welfare schemes has to be drawn from the Consolidated Fund of India.
Ramesh had earlier claimed in the top court that the Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Bill, 2016 was certified as a money bill to avoid its scrutiny by the Rajya Sabha which does not have any say on such legislations.
The Bill was discussed and passed by the Lok Sabha on March 11 last year. It was taken up in Rajya Sabha on March 16, where several amendments were made to it.
The bill was returned the same evening to the Lok Sabha, which rejected all the amendments adopted by the Upper House and passed it without any of these changes.
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11926 - House panel wants fresh look at Aadhaar issue - Indian Express
When the panel met Monday, Chidambaram said that with the apex court’s ruling, the security of Aadhaar data is something in which the Home Ministry will have a role and hence the whole issue now needs to be examined again. Most members in the panel concurred.
Written by Anand Mishra | New Delhi | Published:August 29, 2017 4:08 am
The panel has decided to call Home Secretary Rajiv Gauba in the next meeting.
The Supreme Court’s ruling upholding right to privacy as a fundamental right under the Constitution came up for discussion on Monday in a meeting of the Parliamentary Committee of Home Affairs chaired by former Home Minister P Chidambaram, which is discussing the issue of national security and privacy concerns related to Aadhaar. In the earlier meeting on July 21, the panel was told by Home Ministry officials that the Aadhaar database is not under their control.
When the panel met Monday, Chidambaram said that with the apex court’s ruling, the security of Aadhaar data is something in which the Home Ministry will have a role and hence the whole issue now needs to be examined again. Most members in the panel concurred. The panel has decided to call Home Secretary Rajiv Gauba in the next meeting.
The panel is examining the issue at a time concerns have been raised about privacy issues and security of Aadhaar data. In the half-an-hour long meeting, the panel members also raised questions about two Aadhaar data theft cases, the sources said.
For all the latest India News, download Indian Express App
11925 - Aadhaar? It's your choice - Khaleej Times
Nazeem Beegum /Dubai
Filed on August 28, 2017
https://www.khaleejtimes.com/aadhar-its-your-choice
To apply or not to apply for an Aadhaar card - that's the million dollar question on the minds of several Indian expatriates ever since the Indian government made the document mandatory for Indian residents to file their tax returns.
The Unique Identification Authority of India, which issues the Aadhaar card, has recently clarified that the document is not mandatory for non-resident Indians (NRIs). However, NRIs are of the opinion that the government cannot deny them right to get an Aadhaar card, which is a unique identity for all Indian citizens.
In an exclusive interview with Khaleej Times, T.V.S. Ramana Rao, regional head, Middle East, West Asia and North Africa at the State Bank of India (SBI), sheds more light on the contentious issue as well as how the bank functions for 'every Indian', including millions of expats living in different parts of the world. Here are excerpts of the interview:
Q - Can you tell us why NRIs are not allowed to apply for an Aadhaar card? Responding to our earlier report, Indian expats from as far as the US said they faced several problems with bank transactions, including fund transfer. Is it because of not having an Aadhaar card?
Every Indian has the right to get an Aadhaar card. However, NRIs need not obtain the Aadhaar as it is required only for Indian residents. If somebody is keen to get the Aadhaar card, they can apply for it showing their address and ID proof. People who have already obtained it before moving out of the country can ask the bank to link the card with their account. As per rules, NRIs don't need Aadhaar or PAN cards for any bank transaction, including fund transfer from NRE to NRO accounts.
Q - What about people of Indian origin who hold OIC cards? Do they need an Aadhaar card to operate their bank accounts and own properties in India? Are they liable to pay income tax?
Whether you are an NRI or PoI, if you earn any income inside India, it is liable for taxation. If you earn income outside India and qualify as an NRI, you are not supposed to pay tax on that income. The threshold for taxable income is ?250,000 per year and only those who have income in excess of this limit have to file a return. Interest earned on non-resident external (NRE) accounts or foreign currency non-repatriable (FCNR) accounts are not subjected to taxation. But interest on any other deposit is subjected to taxation.
Q - Why is there a hesitation to issue Aadhaar cards to NRIs?
There is no such reluctance. Anybody can go to an Aadhar enrollment centre and get it free of cost. If somebody is keen to get it, submit the address and identity proof. NRIs can give their passport as identity proof. And if the address proof matches with the identity proof, they can apply for an Aadhaar card.
Q - Will granting Aadhaar cards to NRIs help the government curb benami-operated accounts?
For that, banks depend on KYC (know your customer) details. Nobody can send amounts disproportionate to their income. The Central Bank monitors it. When somebody tries to send a huge amount which does not match their profile, alerts are generated in the anti-money laundering cell. If any irregularity is found, banks file a suspicious transaction report and report it to the government, not to the customer.
Q - SBI savings bank account holders complain of lower deposit rates. Will this not affect the saving habit of expats?
The savings bank rate has recently come down from four to 3.5 per cent. I don't think it will affect expats' saving habit because people don't consider interest rate on the savings bank account. They maintain these accounts for routine expenses or until they decide on further investment. For example, before the merger, one-third of State Bank of Travancore deposits were from their NRI clientele. Substantial savings come only from individuals and to some extent from corporates.Though it depends on savings capacity of a person, Indian expats save in whatever way they can.
- nazeem@khaleejtimes.com
Nazeem Beegum
11924 - Plea for early Aadhaar hearing - The Hindu
NEW DELHI, AUGUST 28, 2017 22:29 IST
With deadline for enrolment nearing, petitioners seek urgent resolution of case
The petitioners in the Aadhaar case is expected to make an urgent mentioning before a Bench, headed by Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra, on August 29 for an early decision on the validity of the scheme.
The urgency is due to the fact that September 30 is the deadline for the public to enrol themselves in the Aadhaar scheme for accessing welfare benefits.
The Centre had earlier extended the June 30 deadline till September 30 for those who are availing themselves of the benefits of welfare schemes without Aadhaar.
A five-judge Constitution Bench, led by J.S. Khehar who demitted office as Chief Justice of India on Monday, was considering the validity of the scheme. The hearing before this Bench came to a standstill after the court wanted to first know whether or not the right to privacy is a fundamental one.
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A shot in the arm
The question was referred to a nine-judge Bench that unanimously ruled on August 24 that privacy is a fundamental right inherent to life and personal liberty.
Bolstered by this judgment, the petitioners, represented by senior advocate Shyam Divan and Vipin Nair who have argued that the biometric details collected under the Aadhaar scheme violated bodily and informational privacy, want an early resolution of their case. With the retirement of Justice Khehar, Chief Justice Misra will have to re-configure the Constitution Bench handling the Aadhaar case.
‘Constricts freedom’
The petitioners have challenged the validity of over 17 government schemes that required Aadhaar. They said the mandatory requirement of Aadhaar for these schemes “constricts rights and freedoms which a citizen has long been enjoying unless and until they part with their personal biometric information to the government.”
The petition termed the Aadhaar Act of 2016 unconstitutional and contrary to the concept of limited and accountable government.
“Collection of biometric data, including fingerprints, and storing them in a central depository per se puts the state in an extremely dominant position in relation to the individual citizen,” the petition said. “Going by the stand of the UIDAI itself, the number of cases in which de-duplication resulted in the rejection of an application for an Aadhaar number is to the tune of nine crore out of around 100 crore enrolments. The number, nine crore, is just a little less than the population of Bihar and twice the population of Odisha as per the 2011 census,” it said.
Tuesday, August 29, 2017
11923 - Why are Indian banks harassing their customers over Aadhaar? - Quartz
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August 29, 2017 Quartz India
It was meant to be a one-stop solution to the identity conundrum of over a billion Indians. Aadhaar, the massive 12-digit biometric authentication platform, was expected to make the routine transactions, which citizens enter into with the government and private entities, more transparent.
However, this unique identity number may only have rendered the system more opaque.
The banking sector is a case in point.
Due to a confounding mix of lack of communication, multiple authorities, and parallel sets of instructions, millions of Indians now face the risk of their banking transactions being disapproved and accounts being frozen, even as lenders refuse new customers—all over Aadhaar.
The confusion
At the heart of the problem is the dichotomy between what the government and the sector regulator, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), say about the documents required to transact.
A June 01, 2017, notification from India’s finance ministry says that the prevention of money-laundering rules, 2005, have been modified to make it mandatory to link bank accounts to customers’ Aadhaar numbers by Dec. 31.
The ministry’s communication also says that one can use either Aadhaar or one’s permanent account number (PAN) to open new accounts. “In case the client…does not submit the Aadhaar number or the PAN at the time of commencement of an account-based relationship…the client shall submit the same within a period of six months from the date of the commencement of the account-based relationship,” it further states.
However, reports contradict this, suggesting that it’s now compulsory to submit Aadhaar numbers to even open new accounts.
Meanwhile, the RBI’s know your customer (KYC) guidelines, the primary document required to open a bank account, state that Aadhaar is only one among several options that can be used to open new accounts. The other legitimate documents are passport, driving licence, voter’s ID, PAN card, the central government’s job guarantee card, etc.
“The RBI has not yet communicated to the banks that Aadhaar is mandatory for all activities and they are the final word as far as banking regulations are concerned. So I think there is a lot of confusion because the interpretation from the government notification has been different,” said the executive director of a private bank.
An email sent to the RBI over the issue remained unanswered.
In the absence of a clear directive from the central bank, some bank executives believe they cannot ignore the finance ministry’s guidelines. “Since it’s a gazetted notification, the belief is that the regulator’s approval isn’t required,” said the executive director of another mid-sized-private-sector bank, requesting anonymity.
Customers suffer
Quartz India writer Itika Sharma Punit was unable to open a joint account with her five-month-old child in Bengaluru as she doesn’t have an Aadhaar number yet. “Bank officials at ICICI Bank and Kotak Mahindra Bank said Aadhaar was mandatory,” said Punit.
But ICICI Bank denied this. “One can submit any of the eligible identity and address proof documents to open an account,” the bank said in an email.
Another Quartz India writer, Sushma UN, faced trouble over Aadhaar at an Indian Bank branch in Chennai which wouldn’t allow her to close a joint account she has with her brother. Again, a bank official clearly denied that this was their policy.
Possibly, branch personnel are unaware of the rules, leaving customers in the lurch.
Some, like Kotak Mahindra Bank, have indeed made Aadhaar mandatory officially—not waiting for the Dec. 31 deadline. This, they say, is to ensure full compliance well before time.
“To avoid any inconvenience to customers post Dec. 31, in case the account is not linked with Aadhaar (such accounts will become inoperative), we insist that a customer provide his/her Aadhaar number at the point of opening an account,” Rohit Rao, a Kotak Mahindra Bank spokesperson, said in an email to Quartz.
Other lenders such as the State Bank of India, HDFC Bank, and Axis Bank did not respond to Quartz’s emails in this regard.
Meanwhile, concerns have been raised regarding the very need to make Aadhaar mandatory for banking. The Aadhaar Act, 2016, states that it can be made compulsory only in certain cases involving government funds, such as the receipt of a subsidy, benefit, or service.
With the Indian supreme court on Aug. 24 declaring the right to privacy a fundamental one, the government’s rush to make Aadhaar mandatory for a clutch of services is likely to be questioned more vigorously.
Banking customers (and banks) are desperate for answers.
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