The Unique Identification Authority has told the Bombay High Court that they do not have the “technological architecture” to allow matching of finger prints without mentioning the Aadhaar number.

Deputy Director, Mumbai, UIDAI Bhalchandra Vishnu Jichkar, gave the said instructions to BB Kulkarni, Senior Panel Standing Counsel for the Union of India in a criminal writ petition filed by the State of Maharashtra.

The petition is being heard by Justice VK Jadhav of the Aurangabad bench and was filed after an investigating officer in a case of suspected murder sought to identify the dead body of a woman by matching her fingerprints with the Aadhar database.

In pursuance of this, he filed an application under section 33 (1) of the Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and other Subsidies, benefits and services) Act, 2016 before the Sessions Court, Aurangabad. The application was disposed and no relief was granted.

Additional PP VM Kagne submitted that the investigating officer ‘s application was not in the form of adversarial litigation against the Aadhar Authorities but he was seeking help of the Aadhaar Authorities to establish the identity of a dead body. Since nobody has come forward to identify the dead body, the IO is helpless, Kagne said.

Then, Kulkarni under the instructions of the Deputy Director, who was present in Court, submitted that, it is not at all possible on the basis of the data of the finger prints given to the Aadhaar link for comparing with the information stored therein. Kulkarni submitted that at present in all there are more than 122 crores of Aadhaar Card holders in the country and technological architecture of UIDAI does not allow matching of the finger prints without mentioning Aadhaar number. He further submitted that, such matching of the finger prints will not be accepted by the system unless Aadhaar number is provided and even though the authorities of the UIDAI are willing to help the Investigating officer, the same is not possible.

In his affidavit, the Deputy Director stated-

“It is reiterated that, the respondent does not collect biometric information, i.e.iris scan and fingerprints, based on technologies, standards or procedures suitable for forensic purposes. Therefore, searching the Aadhaar database using latent chance finger prints, which may be called as 1:N matching, it may not be technologically feasible.”

Thus, Court noted that matching of the finger prints without mentioning Aadhaar card is not feasible and even the system cannot respond to it. The petition was dismissed.

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