Supreme Court strikes down part of Section 57 of Aadhaar Act that allowed private entities to demand Aadhaar details for authentication.
New Delhi: After Wednesday’s landmark judgment, if you have given or been forced to link your Aadhaar card details to your bank accounts or mobile phone service provider, you can demand that the company delete the information.
Although the way forward on this will become clear only after the full judgment of the Supreme Court is released, customers have now been given the right to refuse to provide Aadhaar details while opening new bank accounts or getting mobile phone connections.
The same holds true for all private sector companies, which offer any kind of service to the citizens, including those in the education sector.
The majority judgment, penned by Justice A.K. Sikri, has also struck down the part of Section 57 of the Aadhaar Act which allowed private entities to demand Aadhaar details for authentication.
Also read: Supreme Court refuses to strike down Aadhaar but says private bodies can’t insist on it
As for those who have already provided their Aadhaar details to banks and mobile companies, they can approach their service provider and demand their details be deleted from the company’s database.
But since the Supreme Court judgment retains the mandatory linking of Aadhaar with Permanent Account Number (PAN) — required for filing income tax returns — banks will anyway have access to these details since PAN cards are usually linked to our accounts.
In his dissenting judgment, Justice D.Y. Chandrachud, while underling that “Constitutional guarantees cannot be compromised by vicissitudes of technology”, also held that mobile and bank accounts could not be forcefully linked with Aadhaar.
During the hearing, the lawyers for the petitioners who have challenged the Constitutional validity of Aadhaar had also questioned the mandatory linking of Aadhaar with banks accounts and mobile phone numbers.
The petitioners had pointed out that the Reserve Bank of India had already provided a list of documents required to open a new bank account. The Aadhaar card, they pointed out, wasn’t required for this.
Also read: God, please save India from our ‘wine ‘n cheese’ Aadhaarophobics
Today’s Aadhaar judgement is very confusing! Since you need to have a PAN card in order to open a bank account, what does the judgement mean by saying Aadhaar is not required to open a bank account? Because without Aadhaar, you cannot apply for a PAN card. The judges should take care before passing half-baked judgements like this.