SC reserves order on validity of I-T Act making mandatory to link PAN with Aadhaar

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Friday reserved its order on constitutional

validity of a law making it mandatory for citizens to link their PAN card with aadhaar for filing income tax returns.

After hearing petitioners and Centre for six days, a bench of Justices A K Sikri and Ashok Bhushan reserved the order. The order would have wider implications as government authorities are expanding the ambit of Aadhaar for every service.

Senior advocate Arvind Datar appearing on behalf of three petitioners continued his arguments and explained to the Bench that as to why section 139AA of the I-T act should be struck down.

He also showed the sequence of events from the beginnings of Aadhaar as a scheme, and the two interim orders of the court on August 11 and October 15, 2015, restraining government from making it mandatory and extending it to certain schemes only.

"The government cannot belittle the Supreme Court order. The sacrosanctity of a judicial order has to be preserved. Please save the sanctity of the judgement of this court, otherwise it would have a dangerous precedent," Datar said.

The Centre had earlier argued that Aadhaar was made mandatory for PAN cards to weed out fake PAN cards which were used for terror financing and circulation of black money.