Aadhaar gets thumbs up from Supreme Court

It said it was not trivialising the problem of exclusion faced by the elderly, the very young, the disabled and several others during the authentication process. Authentication was found to be only having a .232% failure, Justice Sikri pointed out. It was accurate 99.76% times, Justice Sikri said. He reasoned that dismantling the scheme would only disturb this 99.76%. The Supreme Court, in its majority opinion, said the remedy was to plug the loopholes rather than axe Aadhaar. “We cannot throw the baby out with the bath water,” Justice Sikri wrote. The court further directed the government and the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) to bring in regulations to prevent rightfully entitled people from being denied benefits. Countering the argument that the Aadhaar regime would facilitate the birth of a “surveillance state”, Justice Sikri wrote that Aadhaar exhibited no such tendencies. Authentication transactions through Aadhaar did not ask for the purpose, nature or location of the transaction. Besides, information was collected in silos and their merging was prohibited. The authentication process was not expanded to the Internet. The collection of personal data and its authentication was done through registered devices. The Authority did not get any information related to the IP address or the GPS location from where authentication was performed. “The Aadhaar structure makes it very difficult to create the profile of a person,” Justice Sikri reasoned. However, the Supreme Court quashed or read down several provisions in the Aadhaar Act in order to de-fang any possibility of the state misusing data. For one, the court held that authentication records should not be retained for more than six months. It declared the archiving of records for five years as “bad in law.” It also prohibited the creation of a metabase for transactions. It read down Section 33 (1), which allowed the disclosure of Aadhaar information on the orders of a District Judge. This cannot be done now without giving the person concerned an opportunity to be heard.

Source : https://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/aadhaar-gets-thumbs-up-from-supreme-court/article25052983.ece

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