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The Hindu 

Opinion » Lead

 Aadhaar: time to disown the idea

R. Ramakumar

In this file photo, a man records his identity with an iris scanner for obtaining the Aadhar card, at the Head Post Office in Madurai.Parliament's Standing Committee on Finance has raised serious questions about the idea of Aadhaar.

The government should pay heed to the parliamentary standing committee's views and suspend the Aadhaar project. It would be atravesty to push the project in through the backdoor.

“…The Committee categorically convey their unacceptability of the National Identification Authority of India Bill,2010…The Committee would, thus, urge the Government to reconsider and review the UID scheme.…” 

This was the conclusion of Parliament's Standing Committee on Finance (SCoF), which examined the Bill to convertthe Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) into a statutory authority. With this categorical rebuff, the

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These predictable reactions only reaffirm the widely held belief that Aadhaar is an integral component of theneo-liberal reform programme of UPA-2. In fact, the SCoF deserves praise for standing up to pressure frompowerful quarters, and not allowing the moment to be hijacked by vested interests. Ironically, till last week, the sameSCoF had come in for profuse praise from none other than Nandan Nilekani himself. He had said in August 2011: “I

have had the occasion to…make a presentation on more than one occasion to the Standing Committee…let me tell you they do an extraordinarily thorough job. I am very, very impressed with the quality of questions, the homework,the due diligence, the seriousness that they view these things with. And it is very bipartisan, you can't make out whois from which party because they all ask on the issue. So when you have such an excellent system of law-making...Letus respect that, let us give them the opportunity to call all the experts for and against and let them come out withsomething. They are the appropriate people, they are our representatives.”

The “representatives” have now spoken. For the government, the most dignified way ahead is to pay heed to theSCoF's views and suspend the Aadhaar project immediately. Each conclusion in the report should be discussedthreadbare in the public domain. Biometrics should be withdrawn from government projects as a proof of identity. Alternative, and cheaper, measures to provide people with valid identity proofs should be explored. However, it would be a travesty of democratic principles if the government disregards the SCoF report and pushes the project inthrough the backdoor.

(R. Ramakumar is Associate Professor with the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai)

Keywords: National Identification Authority of India Bill, UIDAI, Aadhaar scheme, Standing Committee on Financestand

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