India’s Supreme Court has ruled that the country’s controversial biometric identity scheme is constitutional and does not violate the right to privacy.
However the court limited the scope of the Aadhaar scheme, saying it could not be compulsory for bank accounts, mobile connections or school admissions.
The world’s largest biometric ID scheme covers welfare and tax payments and access to a range of social services.
More than a billion Indians have already been enrolled in the scheme.
They received a 12-digit unique identification number after submitting biometric data. About 30 petitioners went to court to argue that the scheme infringed on privacy.
“Aadhaar gives dignity to the marginalised. Dignity to the marginalised outweighs privacy,” said the five-judge bench, comprising all the sitting judges in the Supreme Court.
“One can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.”
Therefore, they said that people would still need their Aadhaar numbers to access government welfare schemes and to pay taxes.
It however, said that private entities including mobile phone operators and private banks would no longer have the authority to demand customers’ Aadhaar numbers and instructed the government to “bring out a robust data protection law urgently”.
It also said that schools could not insist on children’s Aadhaar numbers to enrol students, further adding that no child could be denied state welfare benefits for the want of an Aadhaar number.
The judgement was however, not unanimous.
Two judges of the five-judge bench said that they disagreed with several aspects of the judgement, including the manner in which its legality was determined in the parliament.
When it was launched in 2010 by the Congress-led government, Aadhaar was a voluntary programme intended to tackle benefit fraud.
But it has greatly expanded since and eights years on, it is one of the world’s biggest identity databases,
One’s Aadhaar or identification number had become increasingly necessary for common services, from carrying out bank transactions to applying for a passport to acquiring a SIM card for a mobile phone. -BBC
