On Monday morning former CM of Rajasthan Ashok Gehlot’s twitter quashes with targeting on innocent details leaked by mandatory Aadhaar card. The legal challenge to making it mandatory for Indian citizens to part with their demographic and biometric information and assigning them unique identity numbers ostensibly to ensure efficient delivery of subsidies, benefits and services under the Aadhaar Act, 2016 has witnessed several twists and turns.
Central government must ensure safety of details before people are compelled to go cashless or before making #AadharCard mandatory.#Aadhaar https://t.co/oW9hhzQBlr
— Ashok Gehlot (@ashokgehlot51) April 24, 2017
The government has continuously working to integrate Aadhaar with various government services. The order restricted the use of Aadhaar number to six schemes namely PDS( Public Distribution System), LPG Cylinders, MGNREGS (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Schemes, NSAP ( National Social Assistance Programme), PM Jan Dhan Yojana and EPF ( Employees Provident Fund Organisation). One of the recent decisions of the Union government was to made one’s Aadhaar number a compulsory detail for filing IT returns and for obtaining and retaining the permanent account number (PAN). Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said the move was aimed to link PAN cards with Aadhaar and to identify those who avoided taxes by having duplicate PANs.
This mandatory Aadhaar card still have many flaws which in implementation. The demographic and biometric information of more than a million citizens have been exposes by a programming error on a website maintained by the Jharkhand Directorate of Social Security. This digital identities glitch revealed the names, addresses, Aadhaar numbers and bank account details of the beneficiaries of Jharkhand’s old age pension scheme.
This leak hs made so many innocent people vulnerable to theft of their identity. Central n State govts are answerable to the public.#Aadhar https://t.co/N8yglfXth6
— Ashok Gehlot (@ashokgehlot51) April 24, 2017
Jharkhand has over 1.6 million pensioners, 1.4 million of whom have seeded their bank accounts with their Aadhaar numbers to avail of direct bank transfers for their monthly pensions. Their personal details are now freely available to anyone who logs onto the website, a major privacy breach at a time when the Supreme Court, cyber-security experts and opposition politicians have questioned a government policy to make Aadhaar mandatory to get benefits of a variety of government schemes and services.
The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), which oversees the Aadhaar framework, insists that its servers are impervious to attack, but most leaks are likely to come from an attack on the weakest link of the Aadhaar chain.
