By Vidyut Even as the constitutionality of citizens being coerced into providing sensitive personal data to private operators is being debated in the Supreme Court, the Ministry of Panchayati Raj has issued directives to States and Union Territories to actively involve Panchayats in identifying residents without documents and use a network of introducers appointed by the private registrars to get them enrolled in the UID Scheme. The address information to be collected probably includes (if as per DDSVP report): Care of (Optional) Building (Mandatory) Street (Optional) Landmark (Optional) Locality (Optional) Village-Town-City (Mandatory) District (Mandatory) State (Mandatory) Pin Code (Mandatory) Country (Mandatory) This is as per the report of the Demographic Data Standards and Verification Procedure (DDSVP) Committee set up by UIDAI. The private Registrar is free to include unspecified additional fields, though the Village Panchayat name is suggested as an inclusion. This last bit becomes significant, because while the UIDAI retains limited information about Aadhaar holders, the SRDHs (State Resident Data Hubs), which currently operate completely outside the laws and in contravention of the Aadhaar Act that prohibits storing Aadhaar data, are known to maintain more data on individuals in the state that can easily be misused for surveillance. This is already resulting in surveillance capabilities. 13 states have such databases that replicate Aadhaar data and attach more information about the residents of the state to it, as pointed out by digital security researcher Srinivas Kodali. The screenshot below, for example, is an example of how the SRDH Andhra Pradesh is able to map this data…
