The five-judge Constitutional bench headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra, comprising Justices AK Sikri, AM Khanwilkar, DY Chandrachud and Ashok Bhushan on Wednesday resumed hearing in the Aadhaar case. In the beginning, the Bench decided to allow Ajay Bhushan Pandey, Chief Executive (CEO) of Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) as requested by Attorney General KK Venugopal.
Mr Pandey, responding to a query from Justice Chandrachud, admitted that "100% authentication success (of Aadhaar) is not possible as there are many variables, like connectivity, or machine not working. The Aadhaar Act takes care of it."
Replying to other query from Justice Chandrachud, on whether UIDAI know if denial of service happening or only authentication failure happens, Mr Pandey, said, "No. But UIDAI constantly advise ministries that on the ground there will be exclusion if they solely depend on Aadhaar authentication. Which is why in law, they made exceptions and that any official not obeying and denying services would be taken a strong view of."
There is no official data available on such denial of service, the UIDAI CEO told the Court.
When Justice Sikri asked about how people will know if their biometrics have changed, Mr Pandey said, "In such cases, an error code is sent to UIDIA and then we ask the person to update his biometrics."
Not looking convinced, Justice Chandrachud commented that this (failure of authentication) will lead to exclusion. Mr Pandey contented that a circular was issued on Wednesday, which says that inf a person's authentication through biometrics does not happen, then he shall not be denied benefits for that reason.
Earlier, AG Venugopal while concluding his contention handed over compilation of all related documents to the Bench. Justic Sikri asked about relevance of all these documents beyond demonstrating that much effort has gone in. He says, "(these documents) does not answer constitutionality questions of the (Aadhaar) Act when we are discussing its legal validity."
Justice Chandrachud also pointed out that as far as back in August 2009, it appears that the need for legislation (for Aadhaar) was felt. "What took the government seven years to pass the Act?" he asked.
Justice Sikri wanted to know from the UIDAI CEO about shopkeeper appropriating the grain by saying there is biometric mismatch. Mr Pandey, referring to the Jharkhand death cases said, "Aadhaar cannot cure every kind of malaise. At least now, we have proof that it is the ration shopkeeper is caught. Earlier he could not be."
Justice Khanwilkar asked if the software used by UIDAI is Indian or not. The UIDAI CEO said, "Only the biometric match software is licensed from foreign companies, which are world's best companies in that industry. Those software run on our data centre. There are all 6000 server farm with UIDIA, which are very very powerful."
Mr Pandey also claimed that there can be no false positive de-duplicates because there is also a manual override process in UIDAI about Aadhaar. In addition, he stated, "Once biometrics reaches CIDR, it can never be shared on any ground whatsoever except for national security under Section 33. Over the past one and a half years, we have not received any request for biometrics from government or anyone."
Section 33, however, does not allow sharing of biometric even under national security.
Mr Pandey said UIDAI is doing Aadhaar enrolment in prison as well. "We are starting enrolment centres in banks and post offices. Enrolment and updation of Aadhaar is a continuing process. The total cost of an Aadhaar card is less than one dollar."
"We have registered devices for authentication. The devices use our key for encryption. The biometrics is not shared with the requesting entity also. Authentication process takes less than a second. We do not collect purpose, location and details of the transaction," the UIDAI CEO tried to assert the Bench, adding, "We are doing four crore authentications everyday. We do not know the purpose of these authentications. Information remains in the silos and merging of silos is also prohibited."
Justice Sikri asked why has UIDAI blacklisted 49,000 enrollers. Mr Pandey, says, "There are the people who took money for enrolments and whose demographic data quality was very bad. Some of them also misused the biometric exception. Some of them also registered a tree or hanuman. Earlier UIDAI used to trust enrolment operators a lot earlier but they no longer do and have more stringent quality control."
Mr Pandey also informed the Bench that they have enrolled 120.3 crore people. "We enrol children as soon as they are born. We do not take biometrics of the infant. Only photograph is taken. Biometrics of parents are collected. At the age of five and again at the age of 15, we take biometrics of the child".
(Based on live tweets of @prasanna_s, who is representing one of the petitioners and @SFLCin)
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