Almost ten days before a 5 constitution judge bench of the Supreme Court of India begins final hearing in the Aadhaar case, an affidavit has been filed in the top court assailing the government’s 12 digit biometric identification project.
The affidavit filed by writer Kalyani Shankar Menon, one of the petitioners in the case, relies on affidavits of experts in the field of food security, data protection and RTI replies to make out a case that Aadhar is based on flawed technology and is leading to enormous data breaches.
The affidavit asserts that ‘Aadhaar is an insecure, unreliable, unnecessary and inappropriate technology project which is being foisted with coercion on the most vulnerable section of Indians and is threatening their constitutional and legal rights and entitlements every day. It gives rise to surveillance, breach of privacy and identity theft of individuals and is in violation of their rights under Articles 14, 19 and 21 of the Constitution of India.’
Attacking government contention that Aadhaar will go a long way in prevention duplication of PAN cards, the affidavit states that the problem of PAN duplication has been overstated. There are only 10.52 lakh duplicate PANs among PANs given out to nearly 29 crore individuals. This works out to less than 0.4% and the necessity of putting the entire population of the country through the process of Aadhaar, even as there are other mechanisms which are already underway for detecting duplicate PANs.
{{/usCountry}}Attacking government contention that Aadhaar will go a long way in prevention duplication of PAN cards, the affidavit states that the problem of PAN duplication has been overstated. There are only 10.52 lakh duplicate PANs among PANs given out to nearly 29 crore individuals. This works out to less than 0.4% and the necessity of putting the entire population of the country through the process of Aadhaar, even as there are other mechanisms which are already underway for detecting duplicate PANs.
{{/usCountry}}Affidavit also alleges that the government insistence of ‘seeding’ or practice of incorporating the Aadhaar number into several databases furthers the risk of identity theft.
The affidavit also highlights the failure of Aadhaar related biometric authentications because electricity or internet related failures or because machines are unable to read / scan biometrics correctly. “As per the Economic Survey 2016-17, these authentication failures are as high as 49% in some states,” the affidavit says.
“Reports by privacy and security researchers indicate that such breaches have already affected 135 million Indians, the affidavit claims.