PIL in HC against AAP govt circular calling for Aadhaar and voter ID details

Seeking Aadhaar & voter details of school students, their family

New Delhi: An AAP government circular calling for Aadhaar and voter ID details of students of all the schools in the city as well as their siblings and parents was on Wednesday challenged in the Delhi High Court.

The public interest litigation (PIL) petition was mentioned before a bench of Chief Justice Rajendra Menon and Justice V K Rao which allowed it to be listed for hearing on Thursday.

The petition, moved by the Government School Teachers Association, has challenged the September 11 circular of the Directorate of Education (DoE) which has asked all the schools in the national capital to collect Aadhaar and voter ID details of the over 87 lakh students and their family members by September 21.

It contended that the documents and signatures were being sought in complete violation of law.

According to the DoE circular, as cited in the petition, the information has been sought to create a data bank of students in Delhi and to analyze the information so collected for various purposes of the department.

The circular also states that the Aadhaar and voter ID details must be corroborated by obtaining self-attested photocopies of the documents, the plea, filed through advocate Kamlesh Kumar Mishra, said.

The petition claimed that such an exercise "would be an unnecessary burden on the students, teachers and the entire education machinery of the state of Delhi", apart from being a "cumbersome process with adverse effects on the environment" as huge quantities of paper would be used in the data collection.

It also contended that the collection and subsequent digitisation of the documents would pose a "huge" financial burden on the exchequer.