210 govt. websites found displaying personal info, including Aadhaar

About 210 government websites were found to be displaying personal information, including name, address and Aadhaar number, of beneficiaries, the government said on Wednesday.

“…It was found that around 210 websites of Central Government, State Government Departments, including educational institutes were displaying the list of beneficiaries along with their name, address, other details and Aadhaar numbers for information of general public,” Minister of State for Electronics and IT P.P. Chaudhary said in a written reply to Lok Sabha.

The Minister added that UIDAI had taken note of the same and was regularly monitoring the status to get the Aadhaar data removed from the said websites. He, however, said that there had been no leakage of Aadhaar data from UIDAI.

Replying to a question, Mr. Chaudhary said private players had not acquired any Aadhaar Data including biometrics from UIDAI. “The sharing of Aadhaar information is done only with authorized KYC User Agencies/Authentication User Agencies (both can be Government or private agencies), through authorized secure applications after following well established security procedures and protocols.”

In a separate reply, the Minister informed that 123 schemes of various Central Ministries/Departments have been notified under Section 7 or 57 of Aadhaar Act, 2016 as on July 13, 2017. Hence, for these schemes, Aadhaar number is necessary for the purpose of establishing identity of an individual to enable receipt of subsidies, benefits and services etc.

He added that linking of Aadhaar number into PAN database will allow a “robust way of de-duplication” as Aadhaar is based on biometrics. “Further, seeding of Aadhaar will allow weeding out any undetected duplicate PANs,” he said.

“The uniqueness of PAN is achieved by conducting a de-duplication check on all already allotted PAN against the data furnished by new applicant. Under the existing system of PAN, only demographic data is captured. Some instances were found where multiple PANs have been allotted to one person or one PAN has been allotted to multiple persons despite the application of de-duplication process based on demographic data,” Mr.Chaudhary said.