A fresh petition has been filed in the Supreme Court seeking to restrain the Department of Telecom (DoT) and various other telecom operators from collecting Aadhaar details of mobile users. A circular from the DoT was issued, after misinterpreting the Supreme Court order in Loknithi Foundation Case.
The petition filed by Advocate Raghav Tankha also seeks a direction to the Telecom Service Providers’ to stop advertisements as well as SMS and misleading the citizens of India by misinterpreting the Supreme Court order. The petition is filed through advocate Pragya Baghel against the telecom operators Vodafone, Bharti Airtel, Idea, Reliance, Department of Telecommunication and Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI).
The petitioner in the petition also contended that the government has misinterpreted the ruling of the court in Lokniti Foundation Vs. Union of India. The court while passing the final order expressed its hope that a process for proper verification would be carried out as far as possible within a period of one year.
On 23.03.2017, the DoT released a circular, which declared that the Supreme Court had directed them to make Aadhaar based E-KYC mandatory for obtaining new mobile connections and for re-verifying existing mobile-users, and made it mandatory for both Prepaid and Postpaid mobile-users to connect their Aadhaar cards with their mobile numbers. The circular stated the deadline to link the same is 06.02.2018. Because of the circular of the DoT, the Aadhaar data is getting leaked to the private telecom service providers, which is another concern as well.
“Following the circular of DoT, from the month of July and well into September, the petitioner’s telecom operator has been sending him advertisements, emails, and SMS asking him to link his Aadhaar with his number.”
The petitioner in the petition prays that aadhaar is not mandatory for the purpose of authentication while obtaining a mobile connection, or for re-verification of subscribers. He also mentioned in his petition that the circular of DoT is completely illegal, arbitrary and mala fide. The petitioner also prayed for directing the Centre, to take immediate steps in the present scenario, for restraining and banning the transfer of data from UIDAI to private telecom operators.
