Last week a picture of a Bank of India cheque leaf with blank boxes for putting down the Aadhaar number of the recipient started doing the rounds of the social media. Then the Deccan Chronicle and India 24X7 news channel ran news items on this, which was picked up by Business Standard as well.

Why would something as bizarre as this actually make it to the news? Because anything seems possible the way the government is pushing Aadhaar (though it still doesn’t justify the journalists who wrote about it not checking with the Bank of India).

Around the time a photograph of this so-called cheque started to go viral, there were media reports of the chief executive officer of NITI Aayog, Amitabh Kant and the chief executive officer of the Unique Identity Authority of India (UIDAI) briefing journalists on the government push for Aadhaar-based digital payments.

Aadhaar was supposed to be a harmless but path-breaking exercise to provide beneficiaries of welfare programmes with a unique identity document and prevent diversion and leakage of benefits. How, when and why did it become an authentication tool for digital payments? Has the thought that this can seriously compromise privacy cross anyone’s mind? Or is privacy supposed to be a minor casualty in the move to a more efficient economy that digital payments are supposed to bring in their wake?

This slow march of Aadhaar has gone unnoticed. When Aadhaar enrolments started, the form had a column about linking one’s bank account with the Aadhaar number and asking if this could be shared. It was optional, but those doing the enrolment never pointed this out. Only people who knew about it exercised the option; others missed it.

Then banks started telling customers to seed their accounts with their Aadhaar numbers. The big push came when direct payment of LPG subsidy started; this could not be done without an Aadhaar-linked bank account. But the seeding of Aadhaar was not limited to the bank account in which the subsidy amount was to be paid. Every bank is asking its customers to link their accounts with their Aadhaar number.

Aadhaar has also got linked with PAN and voter ID cards. In both cases, people were led to believe it was mandatory with the relevant departments later clarifying that it was not. But now people are being tempted to provide their Aadhaar numbers in order to get faster service. So quicker tax refunds and speedier verification of returns are promised to those who link Aadhaar with their PAN. The passport office promises faster processing of applications that are accompanied by the Aadhaar card.

Quoting of Aadhaar to avail of senior citizen discount for railway bookings will be mandatory from April 1, 2017 (it will be voluntary from January to March). There have been media reports about Aadhaar being mandatory for all railway ticket bookings, but there is no final decision on this.

Worse, even the private sector is now resorting to mandatory quoting of Aadhaar. It is not possible to get a Reliance Jio connection without an Aadhaar card. Other telecom companies don’t insist on Aadhaar but, taking a leaf out of the government’s book, offer the temptation of activation of sim in less than an hour if the Aadhaar number is given. This option is given only to people who decline to share their Aadhaar details; others are allowed to believe this is mandatory.

If the statute giving legal status to Aadhar is called Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Act, 2016, what was the need for the provision allowing private companies to ask for Aadhaar as identity proof? A question lawyer J. Saideepak puts begs an answer: “is the private sector being co-opted to understand my movements?”

What’s all the fuss about?

Because the quoting of Aadhaar across transactions and activities enables discrete bits of information about an individual, which till now existed in fairly watertight silos, to be linked up.

Even without Aadhaar, the increasing digitization of information was causing concern. “The extent of personal information being held by various service providers, and especially the enhanced potential for convergence that digitization carries with it is a matter that raises issues about privacy,’ the report of a Group of Experts on Privacy headed by Justice A.P. Shah said in 2012. Bringing in Aadhaar for various services and transactions increases this threat manifold.