Key Highlights
- The High Court was hearing a petition filed by an elementary school student from Bhubaneswar and his parents, who said that the consent forms distributed by the school under the APAAR ID scheme did not provide an option to decline sharing Aadhaar details at the outset.
- The petitioners noted that a clause in the consent form mentioned that consent could be withdrawn at any time.
- However, they argued that the clause, by its structure, required consent to first be given and only then withdrawn.
- In its December 12 order, the High Court said, “The withdrawal of consent as per the last paragraph of the consent form cannot be treated as giving an effective right to the parent to protect his privacy because by such time the consent would already have been given.” While noting the submissions of the Union Education Ministry that consent under the APAAR ID scheme was “entirely voluntary”, the court observed that the consent forms had “not been worded strictly in consonance with the avowed objective of making the scheme voluntary”.
- “In other words, the model consent form does not appear to have been happily worded in this respect at all,” the court ruled.
