SC reserves judgment on constitutional validity of Aadhaar

The SC is hearing a clutch of petitions challenging the constitutional validity of the government's flagship Aadhaar programme.

File Photo: Reuters

New Delhi: A five-judge constitution bench of the Supreme Court headed by Chief Justice of India (CJI) Dipak Misra on Thursday reserved its judgement on the Aadhaar matter. The judgement was reserved after a marathon hearing which went on for 38 days spanning four months.

The bench was hearing a clutch of petitions challenging the constitutional validity of the government's flagship Aadhaar programme and its enabling Act of 2016.

Top notch lawyers of the country including Attorney General K K Venugopal, who represented the Centre and senior advocates like Kapil Sibal, P Chidambaram, Rakesh Dwivedi, Shyam Divan, Arvind Datar, Rakesh Dwivedi had appeared for various parties.

Earlier, in January, the SC bench sought to know from those who have challenged the constitutional validity of Aadhaar how the unique identification number of a person makes any difference in a networked world when the data was already available with private entities.

The apex court also observed that biometric information, which was collected during the process of Aadhaar enrollment, was deposited in a central database and citizens were required to only give their 12-digit unique identifier number for the purpose of identification.

The apex court had on December 15 last year extended till March 31 the deadline for mandatory linking of Aadhaar with various services and welfare schemes of all ministries and departments of the Centre, states and union territories.

With PTI Inputs