After Supreme Court’s decision on constitutionality of Aadhaar, the telecom ministry is back to figure out a customer identification process that is complaisant with the judgment. The apex court yesterday ordered firms in telecom, banking, and mutual funds space to stop asking their customers for carrying out KYC exercise through Aadhaar.
“Digital identity is required across platforms. So it’s not a question of Aadhaar or mobiles alone. A lot of people, because they move to the digital mode, they need some form of digital identity. Now if it cannot be Aadhaar, what should it be we have to evolve through this,” Secretary, Department of Telecommunications (DoT), Aruna Sundararajan told The Indian Express.
Even though holding Aadhaar as constitutionally valid, Supreme Court Wednesday declared section 57 of the Aadhaar Act which permitted private entities to access Aadhaar data as unconstitutional.
Nothing contained in this Act shall prevent the use of Aadhaar number for establishing the identity of an individual for any purpose, whether by the State or anybody corporate or person, pursuant to any law, for the time being in force, or any contract to this effect, the section 57 of the act says.
“First of all, we will have to ensure that in the coming days, we become completely compliant with what the Supreme Court has said in terms of data not being stored beyond the stipulated period; about private agencies not using Aadhaar database. For that we will be sitting down with the UIDAI and the law ministry to see how to become compliant. After that we will have to see, going forward, what is the way to ensure that eKYC – which was done in a particular way with Aadhaar – is possible in an alternate way without using Aadhaar,” Aruna Sundararajan added.
The Indian Express reported citing an unidentified senior executive of one of a leading telco said. “We immediately stopped Aadhaar-based authentication after the Supreme Court order.”