Aadhaar is fully protected: Nandan Nilekani

PTI

Bengaluru, 16 Aug 2017: Aadhaar, India’s biometric citizen identification platform, is well secured and can’t be hacked in, said Nandan Nilekani, former chairman of Unique Identity Development Authority of India ( UIDAI). 

 

In an interaction with DH, Nilekani said there is no need to panic. "Aadhaar system has not been breached and it has well-established security frame work," he said. 

 

Nilekani also pointed out that Aadhaar platform has implemented best in class global security practices. 

 

When asked about the recent DH story on the first UIDAI technology head Srikant Nadhamuni’s statement on Aadhar, he said Nadhamuni is correct in his observation. 

 

His comments assume significance as UIDAI lodged a complaint with the Bengaluru police last month against an IIT-Kharagpur engineer Abhinav Srivastava and his start-up Qarth Technologies Pvt Ltd for developing an app and illegally accessing the Aadhaar database.

 

Nilekani was speaking at the Carnegie India panel discussion on "Who owns personal data: Technology and Policy frameworks". 

 

He expressed hope that the Justice BN Srikrishna committee which is drafting a data protection framework would look at the model for sharing data and managing privacy developed already. 

 

"We can’t imitate the European GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) in the Indian context," said Nilekani. He said that the European GDPR was over two decades old and that India needs a new framework in the time of IoT, AI and Machine learning.