A top officer with the UIDAI told Deccan Chronicle, “As far as UIDAI is concerned there is no possibility of leakage or illegally accessing Aadhaar details, owing to the strong walls maintained to protect the data. Never has there been a case in connection with data theft.”

Hyderabad: The UIDAI suspects that the the AP government must have leaked the data of the 7.8 crore Aadhaar card holders in TS and AP that was allegedly found with the infotech company IT Grids (India) Private Limited.

The Unique Identification Authority of India had on Saturday filed a complaint against IT Grids, accusing it of the theft of the Aadhaar details of 7,82,21,397 card-holders in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh for the purpose of the Seva Mitra app belonging to the Telugu Desam.

UIDAI said that before the Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Act, 2016 came into place, it had shared the data of card-holders with several state governments on their request for policy-making. This data might have been leaked, it said.

A top officer with the UIDAI told Deccan Chronicle, “As far as UIDAI is concerned there is no possibility of leakage or illegally accessing Aadhaar details, owing to the strong walls maintained to protect the data. Never has there been a case in connection with data theft.”

He said the police has to probe the possibility that the Aadhaar data shared with the AP government had been leaked to the IT company.

He said the UIDAI had not shared the data of card-holders post 2016. The pre-2016 data is available with the state governments. The records may have not been well protected unlike the UIDAI’s Central Identity Data Repository (CIDR) which is well secured.

“During implementation of their schemes, there is a high possibility of data leaks,” the officer said.

He said the Aadhaar data allegedly found with IT Grids would be belong to 2013 and early 2014. Going by the size of the data, it predates bifurcation, he said.

Asked if state government had sought Aadhaar details after the Act was implemented, the UIDAI officer said, “No data was shared neither did the states ask. UIDAI continued seeding of the card for government schemes with the consent of the cardholder. After the Act came into effect, data was shared with the government by card holder which we called e-KYC. There is no possibility of leakage from CIDR,” he said.