New Delhi: In an order that would apply to 24 crore students, Supreme Court on Monday said parents cannot be mandated to create ‘one student, one unique ID’ for their children under Automated Permanent Academic Account Registry (Apaar) scheme, even as it noted the benefits of the scheme.Appearing for three parents, whose children are studying in various grades in schools, senior advocate Indira Jaising said for creation of Apaar ID, schools are mandating the parents to provide Aadhaar number of their children, thus obliging them to create Aadhaar IDs for their children, even though SC in K S Puttaswamy case had said it would be optional. Moreover, the data pertaining to children stored through Apaar would endure through their lives. “No one, in their mid-careers, would want the public to know how they fared academically in their school days. It is purely a question of right to privacy,” she said and claimed that Digital Personal Data Protection Act provisions have not been applied to Apaar scheme.In addition, right to education is a fundamental right and not a service provided by govt. “For providing a service, the SC’s 9-J bench had ruled that Aadhaar cannot be insisted upon for establishing one’s identity,” she said.She pointed out that Orissa high court had recently taken exception to parents being asked for consent for Apaar as it did not provide an ‘opt out’ option to parents and had directed state govt to consider amending the consent forms and providing such an option. The CJI-led bench asked whether the HC judgment had been challenged before SC. Jaising replied in the negative and said it has attained finality. SC said it would refer to the HC order and pass a ruling along similar lines which were enforceable pan-India.Before conveying its intended decision, the bench said everything need not be seen through the lens of suspicion. Creation of Apaar ID would help students shift from one school to another as transmission of their details can happen instantaneously, a task which used to take months with the tedious process of obtaining transfer certificates followed by physical transfer of records.The petitioners said, “The architecture of Apaar, involving centralised storage and updating of students’ personal and academic data, effectively operates as a State-run surveillance infrastructure in the education sector.”
