New Delhi: Welcoming the Supreme Court verdict holding privacy as a fundamental right, the government on Thursday said the right should be subject to “reasonable restrictions”. Law and IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said much before the nine-judge bench was constituted in the apex court to decide on the issue of privacy, the Modi government had told Parliament that privacy is a fundamental right.
“We welcome the Supreme Court judgement that privacy should be a fundamental right... The government has been consistently of the view, particularly with regard to Aadhaar, that right to privacy should be a fundamental right and it should be subject to reasonable restrictions,” he said. The law and IT minister said even right to expression is fundamental. But no one is allowed to protest before Rashtrapati Bhavan without clothes. Even freedom of speech cannot cross the threshold set by the defamation law.
Responding to a series of questions on Aadhaar and the data linked to it, he said only a limited set of information is in public domain, the encrypted data, including biometrics is “completely safe and secure”. He claimed the previous UPA government had introduced Aadhaar scheme without any legislative support.
