New Delhi: The Centre on Tuesday strongly defended the law providing for the mandatory linking of the Aadhaar card with the PAN card for the purposes of filing of income-tax returns from the assessment year 2017-2018.
Making this submission before a bench of Justices A.K. Sikri and Ashok Bhusha, Attorney-General Mukul Rohatgi said Aadhaar was very essential when the country was witnessing all round progress, especially technologically and it was an essential requirement to keep pace with the growth.
Rejecting the charge that making Aadhaar mandatory violated an individual’s right to privacy, the A-G said the concerns were “wholly misplaced”. “What do you want? A vacuum? It cannot be like that. An individual has a social contract with the state under which no constituent can say that I don’t want to be identified,” he said.
The AG said that the programme of PAN had become suspect as it could be faked while Aadhaar was a “secure and robust” system by which the identity of an individual could not be faked.
The AG said that due to Aadhaar, the government has saved over Rs 50,000 crore on the schemes to benefit the poor as well as the pension schemes.He said that around 10 lakh PAN cards had been cancelled, while out of the 113.7 crore Aadhaar cards issued, no case of duplication had been found.
He said that Aadhaar was an effective tool to check the menace of terror funding and circulation of black money.
