Topic 8 of 23
GS Paper 2 Data Privacy & Digital Governance in Education Right to Privacy, DPDP Act 2023 and Consent Architecture in APAAR

Twelve digits, one lifelong ID and zero boxes to say no - that's what every APAAR consent form looked like until Monday, when the Supreme Court finally asked why an opt-out was never built in.

| | Source: Supreme Court of India | Topic 8 of 23

Summary

The Supreme Court has directed the CBSE to add an explicit opt-out option to the consent form for APAAR, the government's 12-digit lifelong student ID under NEP 2020. The order enforces a December 2025 Orissa High Court ruling on a pan-India basis, after parents argued that children were being enrolled in a non-statutory data-collection scheme without a genuine right to refuse.

WHY IN NEWS FOR UPSC & STATE PCS

A three-judge Supreme Court bench led by CJI Surya Kant said it will direct CBSE to implement the Orissa High Court's opt-out mandate nationally and will separately examine how student data is stored and processed. Senior Advocate Indira Jaising, representing petitioner-parents, argued the scheme violates the right to withdraw consent and the right to be forgotten.

Standard News

THE CONSENT FORM THAT FORGOT TO ASK A

consent form only means something if refusal is actually on the menu. The Supreme Court's intervention on the Automated Permanent Academic Account Registry (APAAR) exposes a scheme that treated consent as a formality rather than a real choice - and the gap between those two things is where the entire case lives.

What Section 9 Actually Requires The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023

does not leave children's data to general principles. Section 9 specifically mandates verifiable parental consent before a child's personal data can be processed and bars any processing likely to cause the child harm. That word "verifiable" is doing real work - it is not satisfied by a form parents sign because refusing feels impossible.

APAAR's original architecture asked for Aadhaar-linked data as part of enrolment itself, with no visible refusal path. A consent mechanism with no exit is not consent under the DPDP framework; it is notification dressed up as agreement.

Why the Consenter Isn't the Subject

The deeper structural problem is who is actually doing the consenting. A school enrols a child under a non-statutory scheme and a parent signs a form the school hands over - but the child, whose biometric and academic data is being collected for life, has no voice in the transaction at all.

This is precisely the asymmetry Indira Jaising pointed to in court: the right to be forgotten and the right to withdraw consent are meaningless if the underlying architecture was never built with an off-ramp. The 2018 Puttaswamy Aadhaar judgment already settled that education cannot be made conditional on Aadhaar linkage - APAAR's opt-out failure was, in effect, a workaround built into the form rather than the scheme's stated design.

What the Fix Actually Fixes

  • and What It Doesn't Adding an opt-out box solves the visible problem but not the underlying one. The Supreme Court has also flagged that it will examine how student data is stored and processed - because a genuine opt-out only matters if the data already collected from years of quiet default enrolment is handled with equal rigor. Consent architecture is not just the form at the front door; it is what happens to the data after someone walks through it. For the exam, this is the sharper version of "informed consent" worth carrying forward: consent isn't informed merely because a form exists - it's informed only when refusal is structurally as easy as agreement and when the person whose data is at stake has more than a bystander's role in that choice.

Quick Facts

  • APAAR is a 12-digit permanent student ID under the Ministry of Education's NEP 2020, storing mark-sheets, degrees and achievements on one platform, linked to the Academic Bank of Credits. The Orissa High Court ruled in December 2025 (Rohit Anand Das v. State of Odisha) that the consent form must include an opt-out clause; the Supreme Court is now extending this pan-India.

Beyond The Headlines
GS Paper 2 Right to Privacy, DPDP Act 2023 and Consent Architecture in APAAR

Connect the dots for your UPSC preparation.

Standard news covers the event. Log in to read our comprehensive analysis and uncover the hidden constitutional, structural, and ethical dimensions of this topic:

1

How Section 9's "verifiable consent" standard interacts with the Puttaswamy Aadhaar ruling on children's education access

2

The specific storage and processing concerns the Supreme Court flagged for separate examination

3

A full worked answer framework connecting APAAR to the 2024 GS2 question on Article 21 and privacy of children

4

The named case law precedent (Rohit Anand Das) and how its reasoning could extend to other digital ID schemes

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APAAR ID DPDP Act 2023 Right to Privacy CBSE Supreme Court Article 21 NEP 2020 Data Protection Children's Rights Informed Consent

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