SHILLONG: The Meghalaya Peoples’ Committee on Aadhaar asserted that the Government should put on hold Aadhaar enrolment and requirement of Aadhaar for claiming benefits of subsidies and others as the Aadhaar data breach is critical to security and privacy.

The committee urged the Supreme Court to constitute a SC monitored Special Investigation Team (SIT) headed by either a sitting or retired SC Judge to go into all this and submit its report within a set time frame.

Referring to a news report by the Quint and Hindu Business Line which stated that “During the first six months of 2018, almost 1 billion records were compromised in Aadhaar breach incident, including names, addresses and other personally identified information. This is particularly concerning, since the stolen, lost or compromised data records of only one out of 12 breaches were protected by encryption to render the information useless,” it said.

The news report further reported that the “index is a global database of public data breaches, revealing that 945 data breaches led to 4.5 billion data records being compromised worldwide in the first half of 2018. Compared to the same period in 2017, the number of lost, stolen or compromised records increased by a staggering 133 percent, though the total number of breaches slightly decreased over the same period, signalling an increase in severity of each incident.”

The committee said, “These breaches which started since 2013 and probably accelerated when the present NDA government pushed for Aadhaar enrolment by making it mandatory for almost each and every need and even blowing the trumpet that more than a billion Indians now have Aadhaar, obviously, attract penalty under provisions of Sections 4, 8 (2)(b), 28, 29, 30, 32, 37, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 44, 48.

The committee also demanded that Section 52 must be presently waived or shelved and in the next session of Parliament struck down as this Section abnegates accountability and responsibility of UIDAI or any other Central or state government agency.”