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As the Indian Railways considers making Aadhaar number mandatory for booking online tickets, the issue of data privacy has come to the fore.
Bibek Debroy, head of Railways Restructuring Committee, told BusinessLine recently that they had came across cases where the Aadhaar number and the PAN number were disclosed in the reservation charts at some railway stations.
“My Aadhaar number is a private number. My PAN number is a private number. What is it doing on the charts? I am not saying it was there in all locations. It was there in some locations,” Debroy said.
Indian Railways, for its online and mobile booking process for reserved tickets, requires submission of one of the government issued identity numbers to the Web site, manned by Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC). Subsequently, the travelling passengers are required to show the same identity number to the ticket examiner or checker, to ensure security and act as proof of identity.
Recently, the IRCTC issued a press statement stating that it plans to make Aadhaar number mandatory for online ticket bookings. IRCTC maintains that “its plans to mandate Aadhaar number” is only under consideration and it is “working” on it. Nothing has been decided yet, it said.
Two print outs When contacted, a railway official, who did not wish to be identified, admitted that there may be a need to put a process in place which would generate two separate print outs of the charts containing passenger information. “One print out could be for the train ticket examiner with all details related to PAN or Aadhaar for cross checking with the passenger. The other print out has to be without all these numbers, which could be displayed on the reservation boards at the railway station,” he said.
Meanwhile, a Railway spokesperson said that they use the last three-four digits of identification number without specifying since when.
A release issued by IRCTC last week said that it was planning to make Aadhaar card mandatory for its user registration process for e-ticketing. “This will ensure that users registering on the IRCTC Web site are properly identified for their identity and address through the Aadhaar card number verification,” the release said.
Both the Centre for Railway Information Systems and IRCTC are working on such a proposal to verify addresses from UIDAI for passengers, and are waiting for a policy direction from the Railway Board on the issue, said an official. “But, IRCTC may mandate the Aadhaar card in a phase-wise manner starting with upper class premium Tatkal, as we reckon over 90 per cent of people in using the above brackets have Aadhaar numbers,” added the source.
Interestingly, the IRCTC release also said that it is carrying the Web application security and vulnerability assessment of servers and devices that are part of its e-ticketing operations hosted at www.irctc.co.in, by appointing Standardisation Testing and Quality Certification Directorate, an attached office of the Department of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India.
IRCTC, a mini-Ratna PSU of Indian Railways, has around three crore registered users and the number is increasing with more than 15,000 new registrations a day.
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