Flagging concerns about the safety of the biometric data of Aadhaar holders, the Public Accounts Committee of the Parliament on Thursday asked the Unique Identification Authority of India to carry out a scientific review of its central database, reported Deccan Herald.

The Unique Identification Authority of India is a statutory body set up under the Aadhaar Act, 2016, to issue 12-digit unique identity numbers to residents of India.

The multi-party panel, headed by Congress MP KC Venugopal, issued the directions to UIDAI while examining the functioning of the statutory body based on a 2021 report by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India.

During the meeting, the panel also raised concerns about the high rate of biometric authentication failures in the Aadhaar system, which has led to beneficiaries being excluded from welfare schemes.

After several MPs on the panel flagged recent reports of Aadhaar data leaks, UIDAI claimed that the Central Identities Data Repository, which stores all biometric and demographic information, is secure, The Hindu quoted unidentified officials as saying.

The statutory body added that data breaches reported so far have originated from enrollment centres. It reportedly said that it had strengthened the monitoring mechanism at the centres.

In January, personal data such as Aadhaar details and mobile phone numbers of nearly 75 crore Indians was allegedly put up for sale online, said digital threat analysis company CloudSek in a report.

Union Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar had in December said that there have been 165 breaches of data of Indian citizens between January 2018 and October 2023.

Chandrasekhar claimed that no breach of Aadhaar data has occurred from the Central Identities Data Repository.

However, in January 2018, The Tribune claimed to have “purchased” a “service being offered by anonymous sellers over WhatsApp” for “unrestricted access” to details of the more than one billion Aadhaar holders.