Towards Digital Democracy

SO, EVERY TIME the embattled folks at UIDAI think that the scrutiny and noise around Aadhaar has settled down, along comes someone or something that reignites it.

- Rajeev Chandrasekhar

This time, it’s in the form of the Chairman of the independent telecom regulator TRAI himself who perhaps discovered the need to go out there on Twitter and mount an Aadhaar dare to the general world — by offering his Aadhaar number on Twitter and challenging netizens to show that how mere knowledge of the 12-digit ID can be misused to harm him. Silly, because it was just recently that UIDAI announced the virtual Aadhaar to protect against misuse of the real Aadhaar number. It took UIDAI to belatedly rush and caution public against disclosing Aadhaar numbers.

While several questions arise about the conduct of a person chairing an important regulatory institution — (that requires a debate about the need for a written code of conduct for regulators perhaps) — the other part of this wholly inappropriate online drama was the return of the scrutiny of Aadhaar, especially in the backdrop of the recent Justice Srikrishna report on data protection and a similar input from the TRAI itself.

The focus is and will continue to be consumer rights like the draft data protection law and, as the Justice Srikrishna report points out, the need to amend the Aadhaar Act to harmonise it with the need for data protection rights. I was a petitioner in the Supreme Court when it was decided that privacy is fundamental right. I had predicted then that Aadhaar legislation will have to meet the privacy test. The Srikrishna Committee report has vindicated my stand by recommending amendments to the Aadhaar Act.