On Aadhaar

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

“The Aadhaar Act, 2016 has been the center of civil liberties debate in India. A unified identity program has been rejected by France and England due to its reach and capability to threaten the basic rights guaranteed to all citizens. Even the US has rejected a unified subsidy based identity system. Indian citizens, however, rudimentary aware of their rights and the Constitution itself, had to be the subject of a project which sustained and was implemented without an act. The Aadhaar  project functioned without any authority before 2016 in complete disregard of the Constitution. Today, more than 90% of Indians possess an Aadhaar card and seemingly are the benefactor of various subsidy and schemes with frequent denial of benefits to some resulting in death and starvation. The Aadhaar hearing took place for 38 days; the longest in this century and only after Keshvananda Bharti in the history of India.
Even with such backdrop, where, we the people should be concerned and aware about the seriousness of this issue, it wouldn’t be too much to say that we might have not completely understood what the debate completely is and like Aadhaar, we too have shown a complete disregard to the constitution.
Here, in the following series, I’ll try to elucidate on why Aadhaar faces such strong
opposition and why we, as citizens, should be more aware of its extent. The following series is divided into six parts and will end with the Srikrishna Committee Report on Data Protection and Data Protection bill, 2018. Stick with me.”

POSTS IN THE SERIES

  1. On Aadhaar: Part I (Surveillance and Profiling)
  2. On Aadhaar: Part II (Use of Aadhaar’s Platform by Private Entities)
  3. On Aadhaar: Part III (The ‘Exclusion’ Concern)
  4. On Aadhaar: Part IV (Aadhaar as a Money Bill)
  5. On Aadhaar: Part V (Article 110, Constitutionality of Section 59 and Excessive Delegation)
  6. On Aadhaar: Part VI (The Srikrishna Committee Report: A Reform of the Country’s Data Protection Law?)

AUTHOR’S BIO

Digvijay Chaudhary is a 3rd-year law student at Dr. Ram Manohar Lohiya National Law University. He serves as an Executive Editor for JurisOpen Network Publishing. He also serves as an editor of RMLNLU Law Review and RMLNLU Law Journal of Communication, Media, Entertainment and Technology Law. His interests lie in Legal Theory and Constitutional Law along with Intellectual Property Rights.