Owaisi opposes linking registration of births and deaths

MIM chief writes to the Office of the Registrar General of India

All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen president Asaduddin Owaisi on Friday said that he wrote to the Office of the Registrar General of India and opposed the amendments to the Registration of Births and Deaths Act, which seek to link registration of births and deaths to the population register.

Taking to Twitter, Mr Owaisi said, “Wrote to Office of Registrar General of India, Ministry of Home Affairs opposing the proposed amendments to link registration of births & deaths to #NPR, electoral rolls, passports, etc. It is a dangerous & illegal proposal that does not serve any public interest.”

Mr. Owaisi stated that the amendments are a violation of fundamental right to privacy as recognised in the Puttaswamy judgment. He also stated that there exists no law which provides substantive and procedural safeguards against collective misuse of private data.

He also pointed out that data collected under laws such as Representation of People Act, 1951, Aadhaar Act, 2016, National Food Security Act, 2014 is for that purpose alone, and interlinking and centralising these databases violates the principle of purpose limitation, which he opined is at centre of the right to privacy.

“By using data of registered births and deaths for updation of other databases, the government is proposing a grave and irreversible violation of the rule of law and the fundamental right to privacy,” Mr Owaisi’s memorandum reads.

The Hyderabad parliamentarian contended that protection from excessive collection and storage of data is an essential principle of right to privacy.

“Thirdly, the test laid down in Puttaswamy, at a minimum, requires that there must be a statute for any State action that infringes on the right to privacy. In the case of the National Population Register, no such statute exists. The Citizenship Act, 1955, has no reference to any “population register” at all. The only reference to a “population register” is found in the Citizenship (Registration of Citizens and Issue of National Identity Cards) Rules, 2003, which themselves suffer from grave illegality and unconstitutionality,” he stated in the memorandum.