Concerns over Aadhaar Linking

What is the issue?

Union government is making huge emphasise on Aadhaar linking amidst of various controversies over the public domain.

What are instances of increasing emphasis on Aadhaar?

• Union government’s March 31 deadline is creeping upon Indian citizens to link bank accounts, telephones, voter id, et al to Aadhaar.
• Recently to curb age fraud in various national and state-level wrestling competitions, the Wrestling Federation of India (WFI) has made the Aadhaar card mandatory for all senior, junior, sub-junior and cadet tournaments.
• Election Commission of India is also planning to link Aadhaar number with the voter Id for more transparency and accountability.
• Under the guidance of RBI every payment banks in India request their customers to link their Aadhaar number to enjoy the benefits of the services.
• Apart from this many educational institutions in India also made it is compulsory to produce Aadhaar during the student’s enrolment.

What are recent concerns over Aadhaar linking?

• To link the Aadhaar card with different services, or not seems to be dubious for many citizens as scam after scam tumbles out into public domain raising in the process questions on the operations of banks as well.
• There are also instances where a telecom company made illegal transaction to its payment banks from the DBT of Aadhaar linked bank accounts.
• It is into this leaky system that citizens are being asked to put in their life's savings, information, thumbprint, iris and all.

What is the stand of SC in Aadhaar linking?

• Union government earlier made December 31^st, 2017 as the dead line to link Aadhaar with various services, but later SC intervened in this matter and made March 31, 2018 as the deadline.
• Recently Supreme Court directed the CBSE not to make Aadhaar number mandatory for enrolment of students appearing in NEET 2018 and other all India exams.

• There are much more cases regarding Aadhaar are pending before the SC and the arguments are soon to be heard.

What is the way forward?

• The linking of personal information through a system like Aadhaar pushes the customer into a corner in an already uneven playing field.
• A leak of the customer’s medicine buying pattern could tomorrow become the reason to withhold an insurance policy, without the customer’s knowledge.
• Aadhaar was conceptualised to plug the leak in subsidies given to those who needed it and thus it should be restricted to that.

Source: Business Line, the Hindu