The Aadhaar card scheme should not be seen in the sinister light of surveillance and censorship. Rather, it is a fool-proof method for the government to identify the actual beneficiaries of social benefit schemes and not get duped into spending taxpayers’ money on fraudsters, the Gujarat government told the Supreme Court on Tuesday.
Gujarat, the first State to challenge the Supreme Court’s August 11, 2015 order not to make the card mandatory, said the debate on Aadhaar had been one-sided so far. It was time to see it from the government’s perspective.
“If somebody wants to live in the forest and have no contact with the government, it is perfectly all right for them to do so... But you have to understand that the government is the trustee of the taxpayers’ money,” senior advocate Harish Salve told a bench led by Justice J. Chelameswar. “The government has to identify the target beneficiaries to ensure that welfare schemes meant for them reach them and not someone else. Aadhaar is the method to make this identification.”
Gujarat argued that the apex court order stunted the benefits that accrued to individuals, particularly the poor and those who had no other form of identity. In a way, the August order prohibited voluntary use of Aadhaar card by citizens. The objective of the scheme was to clean up the welfare delivery system so that “nobody takes away the legitimate rights of the beneficiaries.”
In August, the same bench had restricted the mandatory use of Aadhaar to the public distribution system (PDS) and LPG distribution. It further confined the use of biometric information collected during Aadhaar enrolment only to criminal investigation.
In its application, Gujarat said the court order had impaired citizens’ ability to avail themselves of government services and schemes, other than PDS and LPG. “This court, while allowing the use of Aadhaar for PDS and LPG schemes, was guided by the right to food, which is contained in Article 21 of the Constitution. However, it is submitted that the schemes falling under other rights, viz, right to work, right to receive old age or disability pensions under the Article 21, may also be treated equally,” Gujarat argued.
Picking up the part in the order that said biometric data could be used only for criminal probe purposes, the application asked what could be done if the same unique data was essential for social benefit schemes as well.
