Supreme Court rules Aadhar cards not mandatory for government services

In a significant development, the Supreme Court today ruled that Aadhar cards were not mandatory even as various state governments were moving to make the cards compulsory for a range of formalities, including marriage registration, disbursal of salaries and provident fund among other public services, Zee News reported.

A bench of justices BS Chauhan and SA Bobde said the central and state governments must not insist on Aadhar cards from citizens for providing them essential services, according to the report.

The state and central governments were also directed by the apex court to not issue the cards to illegal immigrants.

As it trashed the centre's claim of Rs50,000 crore expenses on the UIDAI project, the apex court said that Aadhar card was not necessary for important services.

The court passed the order in response to a PIL filed by justice KS Puttaswamy pleading for the examination of the "voluntary" nature of the Aadhaar cards. Justice Puttaswamy is a retired judge of the Karnataka High Court.

The petitioner had also sought an immediate stay on the scheme's implementation.

The petitioner said the scheme was a complete infraction of Fundamental Rights under Articles 14 (right to equality) and 21 (right to life and liberty).

He said, though the government had said that the scheme was voluntary, it was in fact, not so and the card was being made mandatory for purposes like registration of marriages and others.

According to the petitioner Maharashtra government had recently said no marriage would be registered if parties did not have Aadhaar cards.

Meanwhile, in a piece some time back, a Firstpost columnist had noted that the rush to enroll individuals through the UID scheme could be rooted in the UPA government's hope for the widest possible implementation of the direct cash transfer scheme for subsidies ahead of the next elections.

It aid that while the political advantages of giving money to voters in the name of economic efficiency was understandable, the government had completely lost sight of a simple fact - the absence of any legislation to make the Aadhaar scheme's collection of private biometric data legal; even though the scheme was being promoted through administrative fiat.

There was also the issue of privacy of the huge amount of personal data obtained through private agents. While the process of enrolling people for the Aadhaar scheme would not stop with the Supreme Court's judgment it might stop government units from forcing people to get a UID card, it said.