The Editorial Analysis- Thinking before Linking

Table of Contents

Thinking before Linking- Relevance for UPSC Exam

GS Paper 2: Governance, Administration and Challenges- Government policies and interventions for development in various sectors and issues arising out of their design and implementation.

Recently, the parliament has passed the Election Laws (Amendment) Bill 2021 that aims to link electoral roll data with the Aadhaar ecosystem along with many other electoral reforms.

Key Objectives: Election Laws (Amendment) Bill 2021 aims to-
- To purify the rolls and weed out bogus voters,
- Ensure Gender neutrality among service voters
- Easing the procedure for inclusion in the Electoral roll by providing four qualifying dates for revision of rolls instead of one.
Expected Benefits:
- Seeding of Aadhaar data with voters is expected to result in eliminating the problem of multiple entries of the same person in a constituency of in multiple constituencies.
- Election Laws (Amendment) Bill 2021 may allow remote voting which is beneficial especially to the migrant voters.
- Providing multiple dates for revision of electoral rolls will help in faster enrolment of those who turn 18.

Inadequate Discussion and Consultation: Lack of consultation with all stakeholders and poor discussion on the floor of the Rajya Sabha/Lok Sabha could undermine progressive aspects of problematic legislation.
- The government pushed through the Election Laws (Amendment) Bill 2021 in Parliament to link electoral roll data with the Aadhaar ecosystem without much discussion.
Exclusion of Voters: Critics believe that the Election Laws (Amendment) Bill 2021 may result in the disenfranchisement of legitimate voters unwilling or unable to submit Aadhaar details.
- The choice not to submit is linked to a “sufficient cause”, which will be separately prescribed.
- Whether the few permissible reasons not to intimate one’s Aadhaar number include an objection on principle is unknown.
Violation of Individual Privacy: In the absence of any comprehensive Privacy Law in the country, Election Laws (Amendment) Bill 2021 may result in-
- Possible violation of privacy, and
- Possible misuse of demographic details for profiling of voters.

Using other methods to identify bogus voters: other identification processes can be deployed to eliminate the duplicate voter IDs.
- The Aadhaar database may be irrelevant to verify voter identity because it is an identifier of residents and not citizens.
Consultation and Participation of relevant stakeholders: Government must invite public opinion and allow deeper parliamentary scrutiny before implementing the new provisions of the Election Laws (Amendment) Bill 2021.