New Delhi:
The government on Wednesday extended the deadline to link the Aadhaar with the welfare schemes till June 30, 2018.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court extended the deadline to link Aadhaar with PAN card till June 30, 2018. And early Wednesday, the court denied to pass an interim order on the extension of deadline to link Aadhaar with welfare schemes.
The top court had extended the deadline for linking the Aadhaar with bank accounts and mobile numbers till March 31 and refused to extend it further. However, it had allowed government and its agencies to link the Aadhaar for transfers of benefits of schemes funded from the welfare schemes.
A plea was made on Wednesday before a five-judge constitution bench headed by Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra for extending the deadline of the linking of Aadhaar with welfare schemes after Ajay Bhushan Pandey, CEO of Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) concluded his presentation and claimed that it would take “billions of years” to decrypt the saved data, including the biometrics.
Also Read: CBDT extends last date for Aadhaar-PAN linking till June 30
However, senior advocate KV Viswanath, who was appearing for a petitioner opposing to the Aadhaar scheme, took a cue from Pandey’s presentation and said, “If the data of UIDAI says that there was only 88 per cent success rate of Aadhaar authentication, then it means that 12 per cent people are excluded from the benefits in schemes linked with Aadhaar. Twelve per cent failure is too high. An interim order is required to be passed to extend the March 31 deadline for welfare schemes also.”
After the presentation was concluded by UIDAI CEO Pandey, senior advocate Shyam Divan, along with KV Viswanath, submitted a list of 20 questions to the bench, which in turn asked Pandey to give a written response.
The hearing on the case will resume on April 3.
