'Linking PAN with Aadhaar not intrusion'

Move to check tax dodging, terror funding

The Centre on Tuesday defended its move to make linking of PAN with Aadhaar mandatory before the Supreme Court. The Union government sought to reject a contention made in a batch of petitions that the recent amendment to the Income Tax Act was intrusion into rights of the individual assessees.

“No one can claim absolute right over the body as laws have been made to ban prostitution, taking of drugs and committing suicide,” Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi submitted before a bench of Justices A K Sikri and Ashok Bhushan.

He said the amendment would just add the details of the biometrics and iris of the individual, apart from the photographs in the PAN cards to identify the assessee.

Rohatgi further said there were 24 crore PAN card holders in the country, but only five crore filed their returns. “We have cancelled 10 lakh PAN cards earlier as those became suspect. They were liable to be misused as it was found that those were being used for tax dodging, laundering black money, and terror funding,” he said. “The idea behind Aadhaar is to make a secure and robust system by which the identity of a person cannot be faked,” he said, adding that at the moment, 113.7 crore Aadhaar cards have been issued.

“It is completely encrypted and stored in central database of the government and can’t be shared with anybody except when ordered by the court in a criminal investigation,” he said.

Defending the amendment to the Section 139 AA of the I-T Act, he pointed out that driving licence, passport and property registration, one is now asked to give his fingerprints, but if the same is kept in record as done in Aadhaar, it could not be termed “intrusion into the body”.

“One can’t say that he would not like to be identified or he would want to live in vacuum or he would like to remain as invisible. There are compulsions of an orderly state,” he said. The arguments on the batch of petitions, including the one by former Kerala minister and CPI leader Binoy Viswam, remained inconclusive and would continue on Wednesday.