Last week’s interim order of the Supreme Court on a batch of petitions challenging Aadhaar may have provided temporary relief to a section of the population, but it appears to have simultaneously served notice on another section – a largely disadvantaged one — that the contentious biometric identification is something of a fait accompli. To the extent that the order has indefinitely extended the March 31 deadline for linking Aadhaar to telecom and financial services until the Constitution Bench of the Court rules on the larger question of the Aadhaar scheme’s validity, it has removed the fear of dislocation of these services for those who miss the deadline. The Court reasoned that there was a case for providing an element of certainty about the continuity of these services until the fundamental question of validity is addressed. And rather than compelling citizens to deal with “piecemeal” notifications to link Aadhaar with one service after another, it indefinitely postponed the deadline.

However, the Court did not relax the March 31 deadline for linking Aadhaar to services under Section 7 of the Aadhaar Act, 2016, which empowers the Centre and the State governments to require beneficiaries of welfare schemes, including subsidy programmes, to provide authentication of identity in the form of an Aadhaar number or Aadhaar enrolment application. Consequently, beneficiaries of 139 welfare schemes, including the mid-day meal scheme for school children and food subsidies, are at risk of falling off the map if they don’t furnish Aadhaar proof by the end of this month. The Court may have excluded extension of the deadline to Section 7 benefits because the provision enjoys statutory protection — unlike the other linkages, such as for cellphones, which are based, in some cases, on executive notifications. Nevertheless, the order effectively presents welfare scheme beneficiaries, who typically hail from economically disadvantaged sections, with a fait accompli on Aadhaar. It sends out the unfortunate message — even if such was not the Court’s intention — that considerations of security of personal data are not uppermost in the minds of welfare scheme beneficiaries in the way that they are for the relatively privileged who challenge Aadhaar on grounds of privacy. Given the anecdotal instances of denial of subsidised foodgrains or other benefits owing to failure of last-mile authentication with Aadhaar, this is doubly tragic.

In recent days, concerns about the safety of data within the larger Aadhaar ecosystem, including at the vendor or service provider level, have been amplified by the exertions of ethical hackers. There are many instances of service providers, and even government institutions, uploading entire Aadhaar documents on public domains without providing firewalls. The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) may be technically correct when it claims that there has been no breach of Aadhaar data from its own database, but the argument doesn’t help restore shaken confidence in the robustness of the overall Aadhaar security architecture. This merits the urgent attention of the Constitution Bench of the SC when it addresses the larger question of Aadhaar’s validity.