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welfare benefits; you still have to prove to the state that you are below the poverty line if you want subsidized foodgrains, or that you are above eighteen and live in a rural area if you want to enrol in the MGNREGA scheme, or that you are a child enrolled in a government school if you want a free mid-day meal, and so on.
    Although the Aadhaar number was never meant to be mandatory for any government service, some felt that no government schemes should be linked to Aadhaar until all 1.2 billion residents of India had one. They were concerned that prematurely making an Aadhaar number-based service available would leave the unenrolled out in the cold. The UIDAI has always advised government agencies to rely on alternative methods of identity verification until Aadhaar achieves sufficient coverage. Unfortunately, some agencies jumped the gun in declaring the Aadhaar number to be mandatory for availing of certain benefits. This was in opposition to the UIDAI’s stand on the matter, and the Supreme Court had to step in and reverse any such declarations.
    Another point of view held by some NGOs was that Aadhaar-linked direct benefit transfers could be used as an excuse by the state to abdicate its responsibility towards social welfare. Instead of building better schools and primary healthcare clinics, for example, activists feared that the government would restrict itself to disbursing cash benefits using Aadhaar. However, using Aadhaar to accurately identify those individuals deserving of social welfare benefits has been acknowledged by the present government as an essential step towards welfare reforms, and has always been a key goal of the programme.
    Citizen groups concerned with data privacy and security objected to the idea of creating a database containing the demographic and biometric data of all Indian residents, fearing the emergence of a surveillance state in which biometric information could be used as a targeting mechanism; at a time when whistle-blowers like Edward Snowden have revealed the extent to which governments can snoop into the private lives of unsuspecting citizens, such a database mightprove an irresistible temptation to a government wanting to keep tabs on its people, violating their right to privacy in the process. Given that India still doesn’t have a single, well-defined law that regulates data privacy, such concerns were valid. The UIDAI was well aware of these issues, and hence designed all of Aadhaar’s data collection, storage and retrieval processes with great emphasis on security. These design decisions have been outlined in great detail in many of the technical documents put out by the UIDAI.
    Once the UIDAI collects an individual’s data, it is stored securely in government-owned data centres in Bangalore and Noida. Unless an individual provides explicit consent, their data cannot be shared with anyone, not even another government department. If any government or private agency wishes to make use of Aadhaar for identity verification or e-KYC processes, they can only do so with the consent of the Aadhaar holder. In such cases, the information supplied by the UIDAI to the agency is exactly the same as the data found on any other government-issued photo identity card.
    This stance on data privacy was tested in 2013, when a Goa court ordered that the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) be provided access to the UIDAI’s database. A Goan schoolgirl had been raped, the police were unable to solve the case, and the CBI hoped that the database could be used to compare fingerprint data and identify possible suspects. Although well intentioned, such a directive was in clear violation of the UIDAI’s policies on data privacy and individual consent. The UIDAI ended up petitioning the Supreme Court on the matter, who ruled that no such information could be provided to the CBI unless the suspect himself had authorized it, in effect barring law enforcement and other government agencies from obtaining