The Aadhaar Bill, 2016

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110. Definition of Money Bill
(1) For the purposes of this Chapter, a Bill shall be deemed to be a Money Bill if it contains only provisions dealing with all or any of the following matters, namely
(a) the imposition, abolition, remission, alteration or regulation of any tax;
(b) the regulation of the borrowing of money or the giving of any guarantee by the Government of India, or the amendment of the law with respect to any financial obligations undertaken or to be undertaken by the Government of India;
(c) the custody of the consolidated Fund or the Contingency Fund of India, the payment of moneys into or the withdrawal of moneys from any such Fund;
(d) the appropriation of moneys out of the consolidated Fund of India;
(e) the declaring of any expenditure to be expenditure charged on the Consolidated Fund of India or the increasing of the amount of any such expenditure;
(f) the receipt of money on account of the Consolidated Fund of India or the public account of India or the custody or issue of such money or the audit of the accounts of the Union or of a State; or
(g) any matter incidental to any of the matters specified in sub clause (a) to (f)
(2) A Bill shall not be deemed to be a Money Bill by reason only that it provides for the imposition of fines or other pecuniary penalties, or for the demand or payment of fees for licences or fees for services rendered, or by reason that it provides for the imposition, abolition, remission, alteration or regulation of any tax by any local authority or body for local purposes
(3) If any question arises whether a Bill is a Money Bill or not, the decision of the Speaker of the House of the People thereon shall be final
(4) There shall be endorsed on every Money Bill when it is transmitted to the Council of States under Article 109, and when it is presented to the President for assent under Article 111, the certificate of the Speaker of the House of the People signed by him that it is a Money Bill
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The court however has ruled that 'Judicial Review' is a basic feature of the constitution and hence, any action that can be construed as malafide, arbitrary can be challenged in the court of law.
 
Hello Aadhaar, Goodbye Privacy

Coming back to Section 8, it is concerned with “authentication”. On this, there was a massive foundational change between an earlier draft of the Act (the National Identification Authority of India Bill, 2010) and the final version, the Aadhaar Act 2016. In the earlier version, which corresponds to the original discourse on Aadhaar, authentication was just a yes/no response. You give your Aadhaar number, along with your fingerprints (or iris scan) and the system verifies whether the two match, in other words, whether you are the person who legitimately holds that number.

In the Aadhaar Act, however, authentication is a completely different thing. When it submits an Aadhaar number, the “requesting entity” (any “agency or person” who is willing to pay the fees) can now ask for any aspect of that person’s identity information, except for the core biometric information. Everything else, including photograph, can be shared by UIDAI with the requesting entity. To illustrate, if you use your Aadhaar number to buy a sim card, the company can use it to access all your identity information, minus the core biometrics.
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NIDAI 2010: “The Authority shall respond to an authentication query with a positive or negative response or with any other appropriate response excluding any demographic information and biometric information.” (emphasis added)

Aadhaar Act 2016: “The Authority shall respond to an authentication query with a positive, negative or any other appropriate response sharing such identity information excluding any core biometric information.” (emphasis added)
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How did this little-noticed shift in the nature of Aadhaar take place? One plausible answer is that the leading lights of Aadhaar woke up to the business value of the database. By this I do not mean the money that can be made by selling identity information contained in the repository – under the Act, the authentication fees must be credited to the Consolidated Fund of India. The point, rather, is that private access to the repository opens up plenty of business opportunities. This is all the more so with the growing corporate interest in ‘big data’. The recent discourse on Aadhaar stresses its value as an ‘identity platform’ around which countless apps can be built.
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