New Delhi: In a major blow to the government, the Supreme Court of India on Tuesday refused to issue any direction extending the March 31 deadline to link Aadhaar with welfare schemes to avail subsidiesand benefits under various Centre and state-sponsored programmes.
A plea to extend the deadline was made before a constitution bench led by Chief Justice DipakMisra after UIDAI CEO, Ajay BhushanPandey concluded a PowerPoint presentation to the bench pointing out that 88% of Aadhaar-holders had been successfully authenticated. Senior advocate KV Vishwanathan, arguing for the petitioners, urged the bench to extend the deadline saying the number of people left out of the system was too high.

He pointed out that if the UIDAI presentation is to be believed, then almost 14 crore citizens are being denied benefits. “If the data of UIDAI says that there was only an 88% success rate of Aadhaar authentication, then it means that 12% people are excluded from the benefits in schemes linked with Aadhaar. The failure is too high,” the lawyer said. He urged that the deadline for linking government welfare schemes be extended along the lines of the extension given on March 13 to linking bank accounts and mobile phone numbers with the 12-digit unique identity card.
Attorney General KK Venugopal vehemently opposed Vishwanathan’s submission and denied the allegations of exclusion from programmes for want of Aadhaar. “Not a single case is there where denial of benefits has taken place,” he said.
The bench then told Vishwanathan that it will not pass any order at this stage and that he could argue it in his rejoinder submission.