UIDAI bill for Aadhaar number anytime, anywhere

A senior government official said the Planning Commission was working on firming up a draft UIDAI bill which would allow residents to seek unique identification or Aadhaar number anytime, anywhere.

Updated on: Apr 24, 2013, 20:09:19 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The UPA seems to be a hurry to draft unique identification authority of India (UIDAI) Bill after a Parliamentary panel lashed the government for allowing the authority to function without legal backing for more than three years.

A Parliamentary panel headed by former finance minister Yashwant Sinha on Monday said it was concerned that in the last three financial years a huge sum of Rs. 2,342 crore has been spent on UIDAI despite legislative sanction of the scheme.

“In the absence of legislation, Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) is discharging its functions without any legal basis,” the committee said and asked the government to bring in a UIDAI bill latest by next session of Parliament. The same panel had rejected a draft UIDAI bill about 15 months ago.

A senior government official said the Planning Commission was working on firming up a draft UIDAI bill which would allow residents to seek unique identification or Aadhaar number anytime, anywhere. The authority has already decided to set up one permanent enrollment center in each district to achieve the objective.

The draft bill allows residents the seek compensation and penalty for delay in getting Aadhaar number beyond 90 days and aims to plug the authority’s slackness in issuing Aadhaar numbers.

Thousands of people across India have not received their Aadhaar number even a year after enrollment and many have been forced to enroll more than once but are still waiting for the number.

“My Aadhaar enrollment had been rejected thrice,” said 56-year-old Delhi resident Vijay Goel, who requests with UIDAI officials for redressing her grievance fell on deaf ears. “I have done whatever I could do to get my Aadhaar number except going to the court,” she said.

The proposed bill may not provide relief to residents like Goel, who are struggling to get Aadhaar number, as the government intends to introduce the proposed legislation earliest by monsoon session.

Considering the current political flux in Parliament, getting the controversial bill approved quickly would not be easy for the government. The UPA government intends to provide Aadhaar number to 1.1 billion residents by 2014.

Government officials said government also wants to provide legal backing through the bill to money transactions made through Aadhaar payment bridge mainly for UPA government’s direct benefit transfer (DBT) scheme.

The bill would also prescribe the functions and responsibilities of the authority, which is not clear, since the UIDAI was created through an executive order.

The bill also prescribes penalties for offences ranging from impersonation, giving wrong biometrics and punishment with penalty for unauthorized access of data. However, it does not speak about the privacy related issues.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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