The government has raised the eyebrows in the Supreme Court during the hearing on PILs, which have challenged the validity of Aadhaar cards, asserting that Indian citizens do not have a fundamental right to privacy under the constitution. The Central government told a bench headed by Justice J Chelameswar that "constitution does not confer the right to privacy to citizens" and he has referred to a SC verdict delivered in the 1950s, in which an eight judge bench had held that the right to privacy is not a fundamental right.

“These judgments, then diluted what was held earlier. The yardstick for inferring it as a fundamental right changed from compelling public interest to harm to private interests, including life, health, safety. Interestingly, all these judgments were by smaller benches,” Rohatgi said.

"The law on right to privacy is vague in the country and a larger bench should be constituted to pass an authoritative verdict on the issue. To be frank, question of violation of the right to privacy does not arise when it does not exist", the AG said.

“It was completely wrong for smaller benches to say the right to privacy can be read into Articles 21 or 19. Further, it was also not open for the courts to carve out certain rights not envisaged by the Constitution,” said Rohatgi.

The petitioners, a former high court judge Justice Puttaswamy and the NGO Society for Civil Rights have raised the issue of right to withhold personal information and intrusion into right to privacy by the state.

Reetika Khera, an Economics Professor at IIT Delhi and Sahana Manjesh, a lawyer-have contended that the biometric identification denoted for UID, such as the iris scan, fingerprint identification and the personal details collected, can be easily misused by a miscreant. Biometric details are collected without any safeguard by the private contractors and NGOs hired by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), makes it prone to misuse.

By Premji