Aadhaar – An infringement to our right to privacy

Since the introduction of Aadhaar in 2009 by the Manmohan Singh led

UPA government, there have been various transformations in the way it
functions. This instrument of facilitation to subsidies and welfare schemes
which was introduced as a “Unique ID scheme” of India for the implementation
of fiscal welfare schemes was eventually metamorphosed to an authentication
key for availing the benefits of society and state. Under the mechanism of
Aadhaar, it collects the individuals’ personal information and biometrics, to
assign them a unique identity which they use to facilitate them with subsidy
schemes and other measures. As per the government’s rationale, it further
helps the state to keep a check on the counterfeit of identity which further
cumbers many illegal malpractices. It is not the welfare policy aim which raises
the argument against Aadhaar but the intricacies involved in this collection of
private data and its security. The crux of its problem lies in the fact that its data
collection mechanism was implemented when there was no legislation or
judicial clarity on the fundamentality of privacy. Neither was there any
legislation on data protection which safeguarded our personal information that
we handed to the state. So, all in all, there was no regulatory or justice
mechanism in place to prevent breach of data, which gave the government
sacrosanctity to bring to any use, the citizens’ private information. In 2016,
when the Aadhaar Act was passed in the garb of a money bill, further
protecting it from the Rajya Sabha review, it ensured that the unregulated data
collection and storage now had a legal backing, legitimising all actions of the
government with nothing to challenge it without any privacy laws in place. In
this light when the Aadhaar was finally challenged, came the landmark KS
Puttaswamy vs Union of India judgement making Right to Privacy a
fundamental right encompassed under the Article 21 of the constitution. Now
that a judicial decision in light of privacy was in place, we became legally
empowered to challenge the Aadhaar scheme which eventually was turning
into a draconian instrument of state surveillance. Although, legally Aadhaar
was still voluntary in nature, its mandatory linking to almost all services of our
everyday life, be it banking, telecom services, vehicle and real estate
transactions, made it practically coercive in nature.
So, Aadhaar in its conceptualization may have been a state welfare
scheme with great ideals of citizen well being and an integrated system of
ensuring national security, but its implementation encompassed such means
of coercion and exploitation that it become an anti-thesis of the very same.
The Supreme Court in the recent Aadhaar verdict analysed the same
demonic nature of the Aadhaar Act, and delivered justice by striking down
most of its unconstitutional aspects giving it only a fiscal nature as a money
bill is ought to have. Though Aadhaar now remains powerless in terms of
establishing surveillance, it still holds sensitive information of Indian citizens
that stand on the edge of this abyss of data breach and indicates an
immediate requirement of data protection laws and regulatory authority.
We, as citizens, must understand now the significance of the boon under
Article 21 i.e. privacy and the state on the other hand should learn to respect
it and never again try to paint in the canvas of future, the dystopian and
draconian picture that it did with Aadhaar.