SC reserved judgement on Aadhaar validity
NEW DELHI : A five-judge constitution bench of the Supreme Court headed by Chief Justice of India (CJI) Dipak Misra on Thursday reserved its judgement on the Aadhaar matter. Several appeals were filed challenging the constitutional validity of Aadhaar.
Petitioners’ advocate Udayaditya Banerjee told that they were expected a “good judgment, maybe in July or August”.The verdict on a clutch of 27 petitions that challenged the constitutional validity of Aadhaar was reserved by the Top Court today, after a marathon hearing that stretched over nearly 4 months.
The court was examining the contention that the 12-digit Unique Identification number given out to 1.2 billion Indians, violates the Right to Privacy, which was named a fundamental right by the top court last year.
The petitioners argued that Aadhaar — built on a mammoth biometric database comprising fingerprints and iris scans — cannot be made mandatory. They also contended that this huge database was open to compromise, citing a number of instances of data breach that had triggered a huge debate.
The government had made Aadhaar compulsory for a host of services and welfare measures, including bank accounts, PAN cards, cellphone services, passport and even driving licenses. It was made the over-arching proof of identity and residence, over-riding all other prior identity proofs.
Supreme Court judge Justice D Y Chandrachud, while hearing the petitions challenging the Aadhaar scheme’s constitutional validity, on Wednesday recalled a personal experience of how his mother, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, had faced difficulty in authentication to get her pension.
Justice Chandrachud is part of the five-judge Constitution Bench, headed by Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra, which is hearing a batch of petitions challenging the constitutional validity of the Aadhaar scheme and its enabling law of 2016.
A battery of lawyers including Attorney General K K Venugopal, who represented the Centre and senior advocates like Kapil Sibal, P Chidambaram, Rakesh Dwivedi, Shyam Divan, Arvind Datar, Rakesh Dwivedi had appeared for various parties.
The constitution bench also comprised Justices A K Sikri, A M Khanwilkar, D Y Chandrachud and Ashok Bhushan.(With Agency Inputs).
