Aadhaar was a rushed decision by authorities, says Rajeev Chandrasekhar

?Aadhaar was a rushed decision by authorities, resulting from consumer rights not being focal in bureaucratic way of working in India, said Rajya Sabha MP Rajeev Chandrasekhar today. He was speaking at the India Today Conclave Next 2017.

"Consumers and consumer rights are almost never the principle focus of the public policy, especially in the digital space. It is only in recent times, with RERA for example, that consumers are getting to get real acts, real rights embedded in law," he said while delivering the keynote address on Privacy Privacy -- The Fundamental Right for the Digital Citizen.

Chandrasekhar lauded the Supreme Court for its ruling declaring privacy a fundamental right. He stated that the apex court categorising privacy as a fundamental right will help in making required changes when the time comes.

Moreover, as a Supreme Court bench is about to hear the case of Aadhaar being a threat to privacy, Chandrasekhar said, "Citizens will have an obligation to provide data to states, will have obligation to provide data to those private entities that are delivering services to them. But these entities, whether they are state or these private entities, will have clear obligations on how they collect, how they store, how they manage the  above data, and how they reuse it."

Pointing security loopholes in the structure of Aadhaar under UPA government, Chandrasekhar said, "Crores of people were being onlined, their information was being onlined with kind of a canned narrative and a rush for numbers without addressing other issues relating to privacy, security and even integrity. And in many ways Aadhaar was a classic example of how a government system would push for technology in governance without addressing key bits of the ecosystem around the citizen and the consumer."

"We have about 30 crore Indians online today, and over the next maybe two, two-and-a-half, three years we expect about 80 crores Indians to come online, transforming India from being one of the largest unconnected nations in the world to becoming one of the largest online nations. And so therefore the awareness of the challenges and the problems that come along with it are increasingly coming to the fore," he said.

The Rajya Sabha MP, however, also emphasised on the still prevalent absence of proper structure in digital India. "Despite the obvious sucess of the telecom sector in having over one billion Indians connected, the basic issues around consumer rights remain," he said.

He further added, "Data privacy, and privacy in the digital world, is not an elitist issue. There is an attempt to characterise this as some kind of an elitist issue, and it is not. It becomes more and more important as more and more Indians come online and consumers do not have the adequate protection against the misuse of data or information."?