Aadhaar card | Maeeshat

Lok Sabha passes Aadhaar bill to further empower citizens

by admin | May 25, 2021 | Economy, News

New Delhi : (IANS) The Lok Sabha on Friday passed the Aadhaar bill to give legal teeth to the government in ensuring its subsidies and services reach the intended beneficiaries directly, thereby going beyond the scheme’s current mandate of merely assigning a unique identity to residents.

The Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Bill, 2016, was passed by the Lok Sabha with voice vote after a brief debate, during which Finance Minister Arun Jaitley assured the house that details provided for the card will not be misused in any manner.

When enacted, the bill will empower the government in providing targeted services to the intended beneficiaries by assigning them unique identity numbers, called Aadhaar. It will be given to every person who has stayed in India for 182 days in the year preceding the date of application.

During the debate, Jaitley said there is an “element of urgency” in passing the bill and urged the Congress party not to oppose or “even delay” its passage. All amendments to the bill moved by members of opposition parties were either defeated or withdrawn.

“Learning from the experience, we have improved upon the idea,” Jaitley said and also maintained that the bill should also not be delayed by sending it to any parliamentary panel. “We have gone through it for seven years,” he said.

Jaitley also said the bill tabled by the previous government in 2010 did not conceive the purpose of such a unique identification. This, he added, evoked public debate — and even in courts — on the intended legislation trespassing on the rights of citizens.

Biju Janata Dal member Tatagatha Sathpathy, who represents Dhenkanal constituency in Odisha, said he and his party were opposing it. But Jaitley rejected his apprehensions that Aadhaar card can be misused for “ethnic cleansing”.

The finance minister also defended the move to turn it into a money bill, even as the opposition Congress objected to the move. The party’s floor leader Mallikarjun Kharge said the previous one piloted by his party-led regime in 2010 did not term it as one.

Kharge also alleged the government intented to call it a money bill, motivated by an apprehension that the draft legislation may face hurdles in the Rajya Sabha, where the ruling coalition does not enjoy a majority.

But Jaitley said the new bill is “unlike” the previous one moved by the Manmohan Singh government in 2010. The finance minister said its core focus was on the money the government will spend for beneficiaries and not a mere identification document.

“This bill deals with one primary focus and that is: Whoever gets benefit from the Consolidated Fund of India, either state government or the Centre and other institutions — the person is entitled to have an Aadhaar card.”

Regarding the coverage, Jaitley said 97 percdnt of adult Indians now have an Aadhaar card, while 67 percent children also have been enrolled for it. He added that 5-7 lakh people are being added to the system each day.

Among the other features of the bill, it calls for the government to ask a person to apply for one if he does not have an Aadhaar number, while providing alternative means of identification in the interim.

The card can be used as proof of identity, but not as a proof of citizenship or domicile.

Jaitley said the Aadhaar number will not be misused since the overseeing authority can respond to an authentication query only with a positive, negative or other appropriate response. He said it is not permitted to share the biometric attributes. These include finger prints and iris scans.

The details can be shared only under two circumstances: National security and court order.

The bill also calls for an imprisonment of up to three years and the minimum fine of Rs.10 lakh on a person for extending unauthorised access to the centralised data-base — or for revealing any information stored in it.

Jaitley also made a strong case for streamling the country’s subsidy regime. “Subsidies should be targeted,” he said, “Those who are undeserving should be phased out.” He said the system, under which earlier he himself got subsidies for kerosene, needed to be corrected.

Aadhaar card not mandatory for social welfare schemes: SC

by admin | May 25, 2021 | News, Politics

New Delhi:(IANS) The Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled that the Aadhaar card was not mandatory for availing benefits under the government’s social welfare schemes and personal information furnished by an individual for the card would not be shared with any person or authority.

“The production of an Aadhaar card will not be condition for obtaining any benefits otherwise due to a citizen,” the court said in its four direction interim order.

A bench of Justice J. Chelameswar, Justice S.A.Bobde and Justice C. Nagappan said this while referring to the constitution bench the challenge to the constitutional validity of the Aadhaar scheme, in a batch of petitions, on the grounds that it violates the right to privacy.

In the interim order pronounced by Justice Bobde, the court, in one of its four directions, said: “The Unique Identification Number or the Aadhaar card will not be used by the respondents (the central government or its agencies) 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.”

It may also be used for the purpose of the LPG (cooking gas) distribution scheme, they added.

The court further said that the “information about an individual obtained by the Unique Identification Authority of India while issuing an Aadhaar card shall not be used for any other purpose, save as above, except as may be directed by a court for the purpose of criminal investigation”.

Taking on record Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi’s statement that the government and its agencies do not share any personal information of an Aadhaar card holder with any other person or authority, the court said it “allayed the apprehension for now, that there is a widespread breach of privacy of those to whom an Aadhaar card has been issued”.

It did not pass any order on the plea by senior counsel Shyam Divan appearing for petitioner Justice K.S.Puttaswamy, a former Karnataka High Court judge, that any further enrolment of people under the Aadhaar scheme should be put on hold till the matter was decided by the constitution bench, thus allowing the process to continue.

Another direction said that the government will give “wide publicity in the electronic and print media including radio and television networks that it is not mandatory for a citizen to obtain an Aadhaar card”.

It said the hearing by the constitution bench on the challenge to the Aadhaar scheme may be held as early as possible.

Referring the challenge to Aadhaar scheme on the grounds of its being violative of right to privacy to the constitution bench, the court said: “We are of the humble opinion that there appears to be certain amount of apparent unresolved contradiction in the law declared by this court” on the question whether privacy was a fundamental right or was just a right.

The court was referring to the conflicting judgments of 1954 by a eight judge bench and a 1964 six judge bench holding that right to privacy was not a fundamental right and that of the mid-1970s onwards where smaller bench of two to three judges gradually asserted that privacy was a right that can be read into the constitution’s article 21 or its other provisions.

“If the observations made (in 1954 and 1964) are to be read literally and accepted as the law of this country, the fundamental rights guaranteed under the Constitution of India and more particularly right to liberty under article 21 would be denuded of vigour and vitality.

“At the same time, we are also of the opinion that the institutional integrity and judicial discipline require that pronouncement made by larger benches of this court cannot be ignored by the smaller benches without appropriately explaining the reasons for not following the pronouncements made by such larger benches.

“Therefore, in our opinion to give a quietus to the kind of controversy raised… it is better that the ratio is scrutinized and the jurisprudential correctness of the subsequent decisions of this court where the right to privacy is either asserted or referred be examined and authoritatively decided by a bench of appropriate strength,” the court said.