The CEO of UIDAI says despite SC indefinitely extending deadline for Aadhaar linking, new applicants for bank accounts, Tatkal passports and telecom services will still have to provide the unique ID number.
INDIA Updated: Mar 16, 2018 10:36 Ist
Komal Gupta
Hindustan Times, Mumbai
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File photo of chief executive officer of the Unique Identification Authority of India Ajay Bhushan Pandey. (Ramesh Pathania/Mint)
New applicants for bank accounts, Tatkal passports, mutual funds and telecom services will have to still provide their Aadhaar number to avail of services even after the Supreme Court indefinitely extended the 31 March deadline, Ajay Bhushan Pandey, chief executive officer of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), said in an interview on Tuesday. The apex court extended the deadline until after it rules on petitions challenging the constitutional validity of Aadhaar.
Edited excerpts:
What does the Supreme Court’s interim order on Tuesday mean?
The Attorney General had earlier made a statement that when the time comes the government would not be averse to extending the deadline. Based on that, when the matter came up on Tuesday again, the Attorney General said that we may extend the date for bank accounts and other services, but so far as the benefits, subsidies and services under Section 7 of the Aadhaar Act are concerned, that should remain undisturbed. The court accepted both the arguments and gave the order that for subsidies and welfare programme under Section 7, the deadline will remain as it is. For bank accounts and non-subsidy areas like passport, telecom, the linkage with the existing account, the court has directed that the interim order of 15.12.2017 shall stand extended till the matter is finally heard and the judgement is pronounced.
However, for opening new accounts, either the Aadhaar number or the enrolment ID is required. So, some reports in media saying that Aadhaar number is not any more required for bank accounts, mutual funds, telecom, etc. are not correct. In each sector, there are two types of things — the existing ones and the new ones. For the existing ones, the date has been extended, but for the new ones, such as opening of new accounts, etc., Aadhaar is required.
There seems to be some confusion with the Tatkal passports….
The Supreme Court order is clear and is applicable to passport also. In case of applying for a new Tatkal passport, Aadhaar number or enrolment ID with other documents is needed. To that extent, we did not see much change in status for Tatkal passports from the court’s order.
Many states collected their own biometric database before the Aadhaar Act was passed in 2016. In a Supreme Court hearing, the Gujarat government lawyer said that data has been destroyed after the enactment of the Act. Did UIDAI also dump some data related to them?
The other side (petitioners against Aadhaar) said that there were some states creating state resident data and that was not good as it leads to a surveillance state.
In pre-Aadhaar (Act) situation, all the state governments were our registrars i.e. they were registering people for Aadhaar. Whenever someone enrols, the demographic information i.e. name, date of birth, address and biometrics- photograph, fingerprint and iris (scan) — are collected. The states used to keep a copy and send another copy to us. The information was stored in an encrypted manner and there was a key to it. We would do the de-duplication at the backend to generate an Aadhaar number and inform you of the Aadhaar number so that you will have a database of all the persons you have registered along with the Aadhaar number now and the other information you already have.
But yes, it’s a fact that the information was available to them as it was the arrangement under which they were collecting the information itself.
There was also another situation. Suppose you have gone to a bank and have enrolled for Aadhaar, so the bank will have one copy but while filing the application form you say that I don’t have any objection if my data is shared with the entities involved in the delivery of social benefits. For such people, even though the registration has been done by the bank and bank has the biometrics..., we gave the demographic information and Aadhaar number to the state governments. So the state governments had a dataset, one dataset of the people whom they have enrolled along with their biometrics and another is the ones that they got from other registrars where they got only the demographic data. This was called State Resident Data Hub and the idea was that the state governments are involved in the various benefit schemes like MGNREGA, PDS etc. and accordingly plans (benefits of) which schemes should be given to you and which schemes should not be given to you.
However, when the Aadhaar Act came, many of these things went away. The first thing that went away was that we stopped giving one copy of the data to them. We also told them ‘please destroy all the biometric data that we have given to you before the Act.’