15.8.15

EPIC-Aadhaar linking suspended

The Election Commission has suspended its five-month-old project to clean the electoral rolls by linking and authenticating voter ID card details with Aadhaar data, days after the Supreme Court ruled that the unique identification number could be used only for PDS and LPG distribution schemes.
NERPAP was rolled out by the EC on March 3. It was projected by the then chief election commissioner H S Brahma as an initiative that would result in error-free, near-perfect electoral rolls by doing away with bogus and duplicate entries.Though the project was originally intended for completion by August 15, no more than 34 crore voters had furnished their Aadhaar number so far. The EC was looking at extending the deadline to December 31, before the SC order forced it to review the scheme.
The EC has now in structed state CEOs not to collect Aadhaar data from any other agency data hub organization of the central or state government, nor use the data collected so far for authentication. It has reiterated its earlier instructions asking election officials to scrupulously maintain data security and confidentiality of Aadhaar data already collected.
The CEOs have been told to sensitize all district election officers, electoral registration officers etc of the commission's instructions. The EC has asked the CEOs to ensure proper publicity for its instructions setting aside the Aadhaar-EPIC seeding project, including issuing a press note for information and compliance.

No comments: