Supreme Court verdict on constitutional validity of Aadhaar today

The Supreme Court will on Wednesday pronounce its judgment in the petitions against Aadhaar. The five-judge bench, headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra, is expected to determine the constitutional validity of Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Act, 2016. 

The hearing in the case started in January and went on till May, the second longest in the Supreme Court’s history. The bench is expected to decide on a number of petitions challenging the validity of the Aadhaar project, which were tagged together in this matter. Among these are issues such as the right of the state to ask for biometrics from the citizens, 360-degree profiling of individuals through the unique markers of Aadhaar, exclusion from welfare-delivery and other larger privacy questions that come with having centralised databases of information on citizens. 

The hearing saw a gamut of legal eagles arguing for and against Aadhaar in the Supreme Court. Among those who argued in the case were Attorney General K K Venugopal, senior counsel Shyam Divan, P Chidambaram, Arvind Datar and Rakesh Dwivedi. 

Even the UIDAI CEO Ajay Bhushan Pandey had to come and answer the court’s questions during the course of the hearings where he supported the identity project and argued that it increases welfare and saves the government money by plugging leakages. 

The petitioners, on the other hand, highlighted that the Aadhaar project was started in 2009 without an Act and that an Act was passed only in 2016. Petitioners also submitted proofs of exclusion from welfare and argued that 360 degree profiling of citizens goes against the principles of right to privacy that the SC itself guaranteed in an earlier decision. 

The ruling on Wednesday is expected to answer a lot of these questions even as a couple of judges on the bench are expected to write differing opinions on some of the issues under consideration.