Published Jul 17, 2026 | 3:35 PM ⚊ Updated Jul 17, 2026 | 3:35 PM
The card's architecture removes human oversight from decisions that determine access to food, pensions, healthcare and scholarships.
Synopsis: The Internet Freedom Foundation and ASEEM raised concern over the card’s proposed architecture, “which assembles a permanent, centralised profile of each resident and removes human oversight from decisions that determine access to food, pensions, healthcare and scholarships”.
New Delhi-based digital rights organisation, The Internet Freedom Foundation and ASEEM, an NGO, have appealed to Telangana Chief Minister A Revanth Reddy not to proceed with the government’s planned unified card, which they said has “no legal foundation and cannot be implemented consistently with the Constitution”.
The organisations requested the government to place the proposed unified card and the state-level unique identity number in abeyance, pending the enactment of a proper legal and constitutional framework.
The other demands raised included:
The organisations noted that the Chief Minister had ordered the creation of a multi-purpose “unified card” carrying the complete welfare profile of every citizen across departments, drawing data from schemes and departments including Aarogyasri, the Chief Minister’s Relief Fund, fees reimbursement, labour and education.
The directions also included the creation of a state-level unique identity number on the lines of Aadhaar; a special drive to collect the individual and family data of all residents; the merger of the data of the Socio-Economic, Educational, Employment, Political and Caste (SEEEPC) Survey, 2024 with the card; the linking of citizens’ health profiles; the collection of data on contract and outsourced government staff; and the use of an artificial-intelligence-based profiling system to track 360-degree beneficiary data dynamically and to eliminate “human interface” in welfare delivery.
The representation also noted that one stated use was the automatic routing of a death certificate to the social-security pensions database so that the name of a Cheyutha pensioner may be removed. Another was the tracking of passports, visas and skilling initiatives in the name of managing migration.
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The Internet Freedom Foundation and ASEEM raised concern over the card’s proposed architecture, “which assembles a permanent, centralised profile of each resident and removes human oversight from decisions that determine access to food, pensions, healthcare and scholarships”.
Drawing attention to the previous government’s Intensive Household Survey conducted on a single day, 19 August 2014, the organisations pointed to the creation of the Integrated People Information Hub, the Samagra Vedike, based on the survey’s data. It raised serious human rights concerns, they said.
“The character of the system is no longer a matter of inference. Internal administrative correspondence from 2016 to 2023, reviewed and reported by The Wire in December 2025, confirms that the State merged data from over thirty departments into a single “golden record”
for each resident,” the representation read.
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The organisation cited examples for the misuse of the integrated database, and said, “systems of this kind do not remain confined to welfare. In Telangana, they turned to voter profiling, policing, and surveillance of human rights activists, judges and political figures, including the present Hon’ble Chief Minister during his time in the opposition, which is part of the public record. A profiling system that integrates caste and political data, as the SEEEPC merger would, carries that risk into the design itself”.
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Referring to an earlier Supreme Court judgement upholding the right to privacy, the organisations argued that the proposed unified card lacked legal basis and hence, the government could not proceed with it.
“The creation of a state-level unique identity number, the collection of the individual and family data of every resident, and the linking of that data into a single profile are functions that may be founded only on a law enacted by the legislature,” they said.
They further stated that data collected for one purpose may not be pooled and repurposed without narrow and explicit statutory authority. The merger of the SEEEPC Survey, which records caste and political information, with welfare and health databases is a direct departure from that principle. The aggregation of siloed records into a 360-degree profile is itself a fresh intrusion into privacy and a new purpose, whether or not new data is collected in the process.
The representation concluded by reminding the government of its promise. “The government came to office on the promise of Praja Palana. That promise is not served by reviving the extra-legal architecture of its predecessor. Welfare can be delivered efficiently and with dignity without building a permanent record of surveillance over the very people it is meant to serve.”
