Relevance: GS Paper II (Polity & Governance)
Why has this issue cropped up?
The Supreme Court has found a pragmatic middle path between the Aadhaar scheme’s excesses and its benefits to the marginalised.
The issues with Aadhaar
- It was projected as an intrusion on citizens’ privacy.
- It was conceived as a grand project to harvest personal data for commercial exploitation by private parties and profiling by the state.
- Further, Aadhaar acquired the shape of a basic identity document that was required to access more and more services, such as birth and death certificates, SIM cards, school admissions, property registrations and vehicle purchases.
The govt’s stand
The government argued that Aadhar is essentially a transformative scheme primarily aimed at reaching benefits and subsidies to the poor and the marginalised.
The Supreme Court’s stand
- The Supreme Court ruled that the law enabling the implementation of the programme does not violate the right to privacy of citizens; instead, the project empowers marginalised sections and procures dignity for them along with services, benefits and subsidies by leveraging the power of technology.
- In upholding the constitutional validity of Aadhaar and clarifying areas in which it cannot be made mandatory, the Supreme Court has restored the original intent of the programme: to plug leakages in subsidy schemes and to have better targeting of welfare benefits.
- The Court favoured the scheme’s continuance for the sake of the 99.76% of people included under it, rather than fret over the 0.24% who were excluded because of authentication failure. “The remedy is to plug the loopholes rather than axe the project,” the court said.
- It accepted the technical arguments on the safety of the Aadhaar architecture and the end-to-end encryption that underlies the transmission of captured biometric data to the Unique Identification Authority of India. It has looked at the larger picture beyond the merits or demerits of the Aadhaar programme.
- The judgment narrows the scope of Aadhaar. For example,
- Rules making it mandatory to link mobile phone numbers and bank accounts to Aadhaar numbers have been declared unconstitutional.
- Section 57 of the Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery Of Financial And Other Subsidies, Benefits And Services) Act, 2016, has been struck down.
- Schools have been barred from making the submission of the Aadhaar number mandatory to enrol children.
The dissent in the Court’s verdict
- In his dissent, Justice D.Y. Chandrachud argued that the Rajya Sabha’s authority has been superseded and that this “constitutes a fraud on the Constitution”. As a result of this “debasement of a democratic institution”, he held the Aadhaar Act unconstitutional.
- He also expressed his displeasure at the government passing a series of orders making Aadhaar compulsory for various reasons, in defiance of interim orders from the Supreme Court.
- He highlighted the biometric authentication failures that have led to denial of rights and legal entitlements, and located the reason for such failures in the project’s inability to account for and remedy flaws in its network and design.
- He ruled that denial of benefits arising out of any social security rights is “violative of human dignity and impermissible under our constitutional scheme”.
Aadhar and money bill
- With enrolment saturation reaching 1.2 billion people, the programme had acquired a scale and momentum that was irreversible. It was perhaps this pragmatic imperative that led the Court to conclude that the government was justified in the passage of the Aadhaar Act as a ‘money bill’, even though under a strict interpretation this is a difficult position to defend.
- The Court has addressed this issue by accepting the government’s argument that Section 7, which enables the use of Aadhaar to avail of any government subsidy, benefit or service for which expenditure is incurred out of the Consolidated Fund of India, is the core provision in the law, and that this makes it a ‘money bill’.
Conclusion
It was the arguments in favour of benefits to the poor and the practical consequences of abandoning the scheme that won the day. Aadhaar possibly was simply too big to fail.
