Even as Aadhaar forms were distributed on their campus, students at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and National Institute of Advanced Studies on Wednesday protested against the project that they critiqued on several grounds, including privacy and technical feasibility.
Members of student group, Concern, distributed pamphlets urging students not to enrol for Aadhaar. Students told The Hindu while the technical feasibility of the mammoth project is questionable, it also raises several ethical and privacy-related issues.
While the claims about radical improvements in public distribution system were exaggerated, Aadhaar is also being fallaciously peddled as “an enabler of social services,” T.V.H. Prathamesh said. “And then there is the privacy angle to the collection of biometric and other personal data.”
Little wonder then that many sections of civil society view Aadhaar as “a harbinger of thinly veiled threat to civil liberties,” he said.
Also, while Aadhar is being promoted as a “voluntary” scheme, the State is attempting to link several key social services to it. Students symbolically burnt the UID forms in protest.
