Aadhaar case: Centre gets SC nod for UIDAI CEO to give powerpoint presentation to allay concerns

In the ongoing Aadhaar hearing in the Supreme Court, the Centre has now received the apex court's approval over UIDAI CEO to give powerpoint presentation to allay concerns. 

The AG, KK Venugopal had said that on Thursday, the UIDAI CEO in the afternoon could make the presentation. But the Chief Justice of India has said that the court would fix time for the PowerPoint presentation after discussing the matter with other judges of the bench.

The attorney general said that many doubts and fears that were to be raised would be clarified by the presentation. 

However, the court also said that there are technical points related to surveillance, data security and exclusion. 

Over the issue of Aadhaar breaching the privacy, the attorney general argued that, "The act was framed to take into account every fear, and have the least possible invasion of privacy".

"Before the Act, the Court had ordered that Aadhaar be voluntary. So there should be no question of fundamental rights violations. If it was voluntary, how could there be violation?", AG KK Venugopal said in the court. 

A five-judge Constitution bench headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra, is hearing a clutch of pleas challenging the constitutional validity of Aadhaar and its enabling Act. 

Senior advocate Sajan Poovayya, appearing for Justice (Retd) Anand Byrareddy, distinguished between statistical and personal data and said that a person must have the right to decide the extent to which he or she wanted to share the information with the authorities.

The Aadhaar law is bad because the "definition of biometric is open ended, and the government can add to it through regulations", he said."The Act fails to satisfy the test of proportionality and causes an unwarranted intrusion into an individual's fundamental freedoms," he said.

"The stated objective of the Aadhaar Act to identify targeted beneficiaries of State resources needs to be judged on the anvil of the necessity of the measures adopted under the Act to meet the objective as well as the possibility of achieving this objective by imposing a less drastic restriction on the fundamental freedoms of the individual," Poovayya said.Personal data is an individual's property, cannot be captured by the state, he said.

Earlier, the apex court was told that the collection of biometric details of citizens by UIDAI from 2010 onwards till 2016, when the enabling Aadhaar law came into force, was "illegal" and "invalid" and the collected data deserved to be destroyed.

The court had earlier extended the March 31 deadline for mandatory linking of Aadhaar to avail various services and welfare schemes run by the government till it delivered its verdict on the validity of the 12-digit biometric number and its enabling law.