The Indian Supreme Court has upheld the legality of the government’s biometric identifier program Aadhaar — or “foundation” in Hindi — which is the world’s largest biometric database and contains the personal information of more than 1 billion Indians.
A five-judge bench of India’s top court laid down stringent new limits on how Aadhaar information could be used, but said the benefits of the system outweighed any risks to privacy.
The decision on Wednesday settles several major questions that have hung over the Aadhaar program in the decade since it was first proposed by the previous government under the Congress party and then vastly expanded by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The court in January began hearing a clutch of 27 cases challenging the constitutional validity of the system in hearings that stretched for 38 days, eventually becoming the second-longest case ever presented before the highest court.
The system, which now contains biometric and other personal information for more than 1.13 billon Indians, has spawned six years of legal challenges and been a lightning rod for debates about privacy, data sovereignty and digital governance in what is soon to be the world’s most populated country.
Advocates have said that it has granted hundreds of millions of Indians a unique identity document in a country where only 58 percent of births are registered.
They envision a future where Aadhaar forms the core of a digital identity that could eventually include every Indian’s health records, credit scores, e-signatures, criminal backgrounds, welfare entitlements and other data.
Aadhaar has already been used to give hundreds of millions of Indians their first bank account, proponents have said — with another 190 million people still to go.
Critics have raised concerns about the possibility of breaches in a database that could eventually store enough information to create a comprehensive profile of a person’s lifestyle, purchases, friends, financial habits and more.
Indian media and digital security researchers have documented several instances of Aadhaar records apparently being breached both by sophisticated hacks or by small-time fraudsters who have reportedly sold access to Aadhaar numbers.
Opponents have also objected to government policies that make the Aadhaar card mandatory to access welfare and social services schemes, including for free lunches at schools and subsidies for rice and other staples.
They claim that at least 25 people have died in the past four years, because glitches in the system meant that they were cut off from rations, healthcare or pension payments, including two in the past week.
“If Aadhaar works really well, people just receive the same benefits as before,” Indian economist and social scientist Reetika Kheera said. “It is pain without gain.”
Legal challenges to Aadhaar last year led the Supreme Court to convene a bench to examine the question of whether Indians have a right to privacy.
The court found in a landmark unanimous judgement that such a right existed, a decision whose ramifications included the decriminalization of homosexual sex earlier this month.
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