Two months after a constitutional bench of the Supreme Court restricted the use Aadhaar, the monthly generation and authentication of Aadhaar nose-dove to its lowest. According to the dashboard on UIDAI's website, the UIDAI generated around 7.37 million Aadhaar cards in January, but only around 0.8 million in November this year. According to the UIDAI data, of the total projected population of 1.33 billion, 1.2 billion (89.9%) have an Aadhaar assigned. Similarly, Aadhaar authentication went down by 24 percent from 1,093 million in January to around 824 million in November, this year. And monthly Aadhaar eKYC transactions plunged by 43% from 271.89 million to 154 million. Supreme Court judgement The Supreme Court upheld the constitutional validity of Aadhaar in its judgement but limited its use to social welfare schemes, for getting a PAN card and filing income tax returns. The court held that Aadhaar is not mandatory for bank accounts and mobile numbers. The apex court also struck down section 57 of the Aadhaar Act, 2016. It is this section in the Act that allowed for of Aadhaar authentication an eKYC by private companies. Also read: Section 57: Why Aadhaar can't be used as authentication by private parties
