Parliament Clears Aadhaar Legislation: Your 10-Point Cheatsheet

Parliament Clears Aadhaar Legislation: Your 10-Point Cheatsheet is a cheatsheet-style explainer published by NDTV on 16 March 2016. The article summarises the political battle over the Aadhaar Bill, which was introduced as a money bill to limit the Rajya Sabha’s powers, and highlights concerns that the law enables mass surveillance and weak oversight over access to India’s central biometric database. It includes critical comments from legislators and digital rights experts, including Sunil Abraham’s description of the central database as equivalent to holding the keys to every house in Delhi.

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Article Details

📰 Published in:: NDTV
✍️ Author:: Agencies
📅 Date:: 16 March 2016
📄 Type:: Cheatsheet / explainer
📰 Newspaper link:: Read Online

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New Delhi: Parliament has passed legislation on Aadhaar that will give central agencies access to the world's biggest biometric database.

Here's your 10-point guide to why this has become a political controversy:

The Aadhaar database scheme, started seven years ago by the previous Congress-led government, was set up to streamline payment of benefits and cut down on massive wastage and fraud.

Already, nearly a billion people have registered their finger prints and iris signatures. Opposition leaders and some critics say the privacy of a billion people could be compromised and agencies could misuse the data to profile and target individuals.

The opposition had accused the government of using a loophole to bypass those objections. The proposal has been presented as a financial bill, which the Rajya Sabha cannot reject. It can only return the proposal to the Lok Sabha, which is an embarrassment for the government.

So in the Rajya Sabha, opposition parties teamed up to ask for changes or revisions to the bill. Because the government is in a minority in the Upper House, the amendments were approved.

But the Lok Sabha or Lower House, where the government has a powerful majority, rejected the changes.

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has defended the legislation in Parliament, saying Aadhaar saved the government an estimated $2.2 billion (around Rs.14,700 crore) in the last financial year.

He has also said a citizen's data will only be shared with security agencies on grounds of national security and with a court order.

"It has been showcased as a tool exclusively meant for disbursement of subsidies and we do not realise that it can also be used for mass surveillance," said Tathagata Satpathy, a lawmaker from Odisha.

Raman Jit Singh Chima, global policy director at Access, an international digital rights organisation, said the proposed Indian law lacked the transparency and oversight safeguards found in Europe or the United States, which last year reformed its bulk telephone surveillance programme.

Sunil Abraham, who heads the Bengaluru-based Centre for Internet and Society, warned, "Maintaining a central database is akin to getting the keys of every house in Delhi and storing them at a central police station," he said.

Context and Background

This cheatsheet condensed a contentious parliamentary moment when the Aadhaar Bill was pushed through as a money bill, limiting the Rajya Sabha’s ability to block or reshape it. Opposition parties objected that this procedural choice sidestepped substantive debate about surveillance risks and the scope of state access to biometric data. The government, by contrast, framed Aadhaar primarily as an efficiency tool for subsidy delivery and fiscal savings.

The expert quotes underscored how far the legal framework lagged behind the technological capabilities of a nationwide biometric database. Concerns ranged from mission creep and mass surveillance to the absence of independent oversight comparable to safeguards in Europe or the United States. Sunil Abraham’s “keys of every house in Delhi” analogy captured the structural vulnerability created when a single centralised system stores identifiers for nearly the entire population, raising questions that subsequent privacy and data protection debates in India have continued to confront.