Aadhaar: Supreme Court makes RBI a party in the case

Moneylife Digital Team 13 February 2015

In a PIL, Col (retd) Mathew Thomas argued that the RBI was asking for Aadhaar number to open bank accounts and KYC documents contrary to interim decision by the Supreme Court for not making the UID mandatory

The Supreme Court on Friday made the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) a party in a plea challenging the validity of the Aadhaar scheme through which the government intends to issue a unique identity number to all residents in the country, says a report.

According to report from the Mint, a bench headed by chief justice HL Dattu said the case will be heard by a bench constituted by him as the issue of Aadhaar was important.

Col (retd) Mathew Thomas, a former defence services officer and missile scientist turned civic activist had filed the plea before the apex court. Col (retd) Thomas, as per the news report had claimed that RBI was asking for the Aadhaar number to open bank accounts and know-your-customer documents.

The PIL had relied on an earlier interim order of the apex court, which had said that the Aadhaar number could not be a mandatory requirement in availing of services, the report says.

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court had asked the Narendra Modi government to spell out its stand on Aadhaar and whether it wants to continue with the ambitious programme initiated by its predecessor for giving unique identification (UID) number to every resident across the country.

During the hearing, Senior advocate Gopal Subramaniam, appearing for Col (retd) Thomas, had said that similar schemes for UID have already been scrapped by many countries and the Centre should be directed to destroy all data collected by it under the scheme.

"Even illegal migrants in country are getting Aadhaar card, enabling them to avail government services which are meant only for citizens of India and not for mere residents. The avowed objectives of UID scheme are itself farcical and the entire exercise is nothing but colossal waste of public money and exposes India's vulnerabilities," he was quoted in a news report.

Comments

User

MG Warrier

1 decade ago

May be, as is being done in the case of about 100 Central Schemes under implementation, there is a case for reviewing or revisiting many schemes like AADHAAR, NPS and Jan Dhan Yojana which were introduced without adequate homework. Huge amount of public resources is being deployed in such schemes without corresponding benefit and sometimes adding to the agony of the target group. Moneylife has earlier covered NPS and AADHAAR focusing their in-built inadequacies in several articles/comments(some of them by me also).