‘Aadhaar-SIM linking based on SC orders’

The government on Thursday insisted that the directives of the Department of Telecommunications to seed SIM cards with Aadhaar is based on “at least two Supreme Court orders”.

Attorney General K.K. Venugopal said one of the Supreme Court orders was from Justice D.Y. Chandrachud, who is a member of the five-judge Constitution Bench led by Chief Justice Dipak Misra hearing the challenge to the Aadhaar scheme.

Mr. Venugopal made the submission just before the Bench was rising at the end of the day.

He said he would expand the point in the next hearing.

The Supreme Court had on April 25 questioned the mandatory linking of Aadhaar-SIM and said the government is using an order passed by it on February 6 last year as a “tool” to seed Aadhaar with SIM cards.

Justice Chandrachud, after perusing the February 6 order in the Lok Niti Foundation case, had said the court had only asked the government to tighten the verification process of mobile phone users through Aadhaar linkage. “In fact there was no such direction from the Supreme Court, but you took it and used it as tool to make Aadhaar mandatory for mobile users,” the Bench observed orally.