Dhananjay Mahapatra | TNN | Updated: Mar 23, 2018, 08:33 IST
HIGHLIGHTS
- UIDAI chief Ajay Bhushan Pandey sought to answer petitioners questioning Aadhaar’s constitutional validity on the ground that it violated citizens’ right to privacy
- He said biometric data attached to each Aadhaar was safe from hacking as the storage facility was not connected to the internet
- The petitioners argued Aadhaar can allow the government to keep tabs on people’s activities in the social sphere
NEW DELHI: Aadhaar is blind to the purpose of authentication as it only establishes identity and nothing more, Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) CEO Ajay Bhushan Pandey told the Supreme Court on Thursday, countering apprehensions that Aadhaar would result in “virtual surveillance” of citizens. In the course of a Power-Point presentation, Pandey said Aadhaar was a tool to establish identity and was not an aggregator of data that could be misused by the government to track citizens in the manner of a big brother state.
UIDAI chief Ajay Bhushan Pandey sought to answer petitioners questioning Aadhaar’s constitutional validity on the ground that it violated citizens’ right to privacy. The petitioners argued Aadhaar can allow the government to keep tabs on people’s activities in the social sphere by finding out through its authentication function the banks people visited, where they travelled, the airlines used, the telecom company that issued a SIM card, which school their children attended and who was their spouse.
Through the one-and-ahalf-hour long unfinished presentation, titled “1.2 Billion+,” before a bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justices A K Sikri, A M Khanwilkar, D Y Chandrachud and Ashok Bhushan, Pandey said, “We (UIDAI) are completely ignorant about the transactions for which a person uses Aadhaar for authentication.”
“We just provide the bare minimum information through leased lines connected to the database for authentication purposes. We are blind to transactions. We do not know which telecom service provider’s SIM card is being purchased by a person by using Aadhaar.” Pandey said Aadhaar was used for 1,696 crore authentications so far, 464 crore eKYC verifications and four crore authentications are carried daily. He said biometric data attached to each Aadhaar was safe from hacking as the storage facility was not connected to the internet.
“Each Aadhaar biometric is encrypted by a 2048-key combination and to decode it, the best and fastest computer of our era will take the age of the universe just to hack into one card’s biometric details,” he said, adding Aadhaar was the safest and best possible national identity that could be provided to citizens and residents of India.
Pandey explained the non-exclusion aim of Aadhaar and the stringent parameters laid down for UIDAI enrolment agencies. Justice Sikri asked, “If the parameters were so stringent for Aadhaar enrolment agencies, why were 49,000 operators deregistered?” The CEO said, “The main reason was corruption. They were seeking bribes for enrolling a person for Aadhaar when it is free of cost. Others were mischief mongers who tried to feed erroneous data or incomplete data. We do not tolerate corruption or carelessness.”
“If the quality of biometrics is not up to 95-96% of the standard laid down, we reject it and ask for fresh biometrics. We have learned a lot since we issued the first card in 2010 and now we have more than 1.2 billion. Duplication of an Aadhaar card is bound to fail as every one has a QR code with the holder’s photograph encrypted into it. Though Aadhaar is not a smart card, it has smartness built into it.”