For Whom Is The Aadhaar Amendments Bill: Only To Please Telecom Companies

The Aadhaar and Other Laws (Amendment) Bill is scheduled to be passed in Parliament on Thursday, June 27. The Bill that is being tabled overlooks privacy of Indians and gives prominence to the interests of businesses, more specifically the telecom companies including Reliance Jio and Airtel.

To understand it, we must go back to the Supreme Court’s September 2018 judgement in the in Justice KS Puttaswamy vs Union of India (Aadhaar judgment) case. This had declared that the use of the Aadhaar number and Aadhaar-based authentication by private entities as unconstitutional.

The judgment found the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) circular issued on March 23, 2017, which mandated linking of mobile connections with Aadhaar, a “disproportionate and unreasonable state compulsion”. The same judgment also deemed Rule 9 of the PMLA (Second Amendment) Rules, 2017, (which requires mandatory linking of Aadhaar with bank accounts) as unconstitutional.

The judgement was especially not kind to Mukesh Ambani-held Reliance Jio. “The ruling significantly impacted its pace of subscriber acquisition, which was based on Aadhaar-based e-KYC authentication. The UIDAI and the DoT rapidly came up with an alternative to assuage telecom companies that there were ways of still acquiring subscribers nearly instantaneously,” says Raghu, who is a part of the Rethink Aadhaar campaign.

Soon after the ruling, the Department of Telecom had sent letters in October asking companies to delete the Aadhaar data and stop verification using this method. In response to this letter, Mukesh Ambani-held Reliance Jio had stated that “while compelling a customer to use the Aadhaar for authentication would be violative of the Constitution, appropriate legislation narrowly tailored to enable an Aadhaar holder to use his number for authentication would be constitutionally valid”.

“Jio, in fact, suggested that the government must change the law to enable Aadhaar authentications. The company’s business model rested on Aadhaar and being a part of the Aadhaar universe, especially because almost 90% of their subscription was through Aadhaar,” explains Srinivas Kodali, an independent researcher working on Aadhaar. In the response, they reveal that Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited (RJIL) has been the largest user of Aadhaar authentication services. They even state that not using Aadhaar will endanger ‘national security’.

In the latter half of their response, they urge the government to work with DoT, and “implement appropriate amendments to the to the Aadhaar Authentication Regulations, 2016, that engrafts and gives effect to DoT’s rules”. The response from Reliance adds that such new rules “will have the force of the law and will formally address the e-KYC authentication requirements of new subscribers”.

Then they go on to list out all the ways in which it will hamper their business monetarily and eat into their profits. The letter states that “the Customer Acquisition Form (CAF) requires augmentation of resources, manpower acquisition at multiple levels. This will require enhancements at Call Centres and IVR mechanism for subscriber verification”. They state that DoT’s current request needs nine months to comply.

They in fact also enlisted the services of senior counsel Harish Salve to respond to the letter from Dot, where they even state that if the use of Aadhaar is restricted, it is in fact violative of “the rights of a citizen to use his biometric data”.―National Herald