The Centre on Tuesday told the Supreme Court that the Aadhaar scheme couldn’t be rolled back since Rs 5,000 crore have already been spent to cover about 80 crore people in the programme undertaken by the Unique Identification Authority of India.
Attorney General (A-G) Mukul Rohatgi assured a bench presided over by Justice J Chelameswar that the government was not making the Aadhaar card mandatory for public services. He defended the validity of the Aadhaar by claiming that calling it off may affect various welfare schemes and the resolve to remove poverty. The A-G also submitted before the court that the Centre was complying with the previous order of not making Aadhaar compulsory for people to avail social benefit schemes, LPG subsidy and other public services.
Maintaining that there was no illegality or irregularity in implementing the unique identification (UID) programme, Rohatgi said that if the court desired to go into the validity of the Aadhaar, the issue must be referred to a five-judge Constitution Bench. He contended that a larger bench should hear the matter as issues relating to the right to privacy and other important points relating to the constitutionality of the UID programme were raised in a batch of petitions against Aadhaar.