Aadhaar-Based Governance: How Modi Used Aadhaar for Reform

Aadhaar, India’s biometric identity system, was actually launched in 2009 under the previous UPA government, but its use as the foundational identity layer across a wide range of government functions expanded dramatically during Modi’s tenure. This article traces how Aadhaar became embedded across Indian governance and the concerns that expansion has raised.

From a Voluntary ID to a Governance Backbone

Aadhaar began as a voluntary identity number, but its role expanded substantially after 2014 to become the verification layer behind an increasingly wide range of government functions, from the Direct Benefit Transfer system covered in our companion article, to bank account opening under Jan Dhan Yojana, to income tax filing, mobile phone SIM card registration for a period, and eligibility verification for numerous individual welfare schemes, a scope of integration into daily administrative life that goes considerably beyond Aadhaar’s original, narrower design purpose.

The Legal Foundation

Aadhaar’s expanded governance role was formalised through the Aadhaar Act of 2016, and its constitutional standing was significantly tested in the Supreme Court’s landmark 2018 Puttaswamy judgment, which upheld Aadhaar’s core validity for welfare scheme delivery while striking down some of its broader mandatory uses, including for private telecom and banking KYC verification, a ruling that established the current legal boundaries within which Aadhaar-based governance operates today.

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The Scale Achieved

Aadhaar has reached near-universal coverage across India’s adult population, with enrolment numbers in the range of 1.3 billion, according to figures cited across multiple analyses of the programme’s scale, including reframe[Tech]’s analysis of Aadhaar’s role within India’s broader digital public infrastructure. This scale has made it possible to verify identity and prevent duplicate claims across welfare programmes at a population size and speed that would have been administratively impossible under India’s earlier, more fragmented identity-verification systems.

The Public-Private Dimension

Beyond its purely governmental uses, Aadhaar’s infrastructure has also become intertwined with private-sector services in ways that have drawn their own separate scrutiny. An investigative piece published by The Caravan, titled “Aadhaar’s mixing of public risk and private profit,” examined how private companies have built commercial services on top of the publicly funded Aadhaar verification infrastructure, raising questions about the appropriate boundary between a public identity system built with taxpayer funds and private commercial exploitation of that same infrastructure.

The Exclusion Concerns

Civil society groups have raised sustained and specific concerns about welfare exclusion linked to Aadhaar-based verification requirements. Business Standard’s reporting, headlined “Linking Aadhaar with welfare schemes has left some of India’s poor hungry,” documented specific cases where mandatory Aadhaar-linked authentication for public distribution system food rations caused vulnerable beneficiaries to be denied entitlements due to authentication failures rather than actual ineligibility. The Economic and Political Weekly’s analysis, titled “Aadhaar Failures: A Tragedy of Errors,” and Global Voices’ #MarginalizedAadhaar reporting have both documented similar patterns specifically affecting elderly beneficiaries and manual labourers whose worn fingerprints can cause biometric authentication to fail more frequently than for the general population.

How the Government Has Responded to These Concerns

The government has periodically introduced procedural adjustments aimed at addressing specific authentication-failure cases, including alternative verification methods for beneficiaries with documented biometric mismatch issues, though civil society groups including those cited above have argued these adjustments have not fully resolved the underlying pattern of exclusion documented in specific cases across multiple states, an ongoing, unresolved tension between the system’s undeniable gains in reducing fraudulent claims at scale and its documented, real cost to some genuinely eligible beneficiaries caught by authentication failures.

Also read: DigiLocker and E-Governance: How Modi Digitised Government Services

Aadhaar’s Role in India’s International Digital Public Infrastructure Profile

Aadhaar’s design, a foundational, interoperable identity layer that other systems and services can build upon rather than a closed single-purpose ID card, has made it a frequently cited reference point in international discussions of digital public infrastructure, with reframe[Tech]’s analysis specifically situating Aadhaar as a foundational building block that enabled the later UPI payments system covered in our earlier article, and describing the broader model as one several other countries have studied when designing their own national identity and payments infrastructure, even as those same countries have often had to separately grapple with the exclusion and privacy trade-offs India’s own experience with Aadhaar has already surfaced.

The Privacy Dimension Beyond Welfare Exclusion

Separate from the welfare exclusion concerns, Aadhaar’s centralisation of biometric and demographic data for over a billion people has also raised distinct privacy and data security questions, a concern the 2018 Puttaswamy judgment addressed in part by limiting some of Aadhaar’s broader mandatory private-sector uses, though questions about the security of the underlying centralised database and the potential for unauthorised data linkage across different government and private systems using Aadhaar as a common identifier remain a separate, ongoing area of legal and technical scrutiny distinct from the welfare-delivery exclusion issues covered above.

Bottom Line

Aadhaar has become the foundational identity layer underpinning an unusually wide range of Modi-era governance functions, from welfare delivery to banking to tax filing, reaching a scale of roughly 1.3 billion enrolments that has enabled fraud prevention at a population size previously administratively impossible, even as documented authentication failures have periodically excluded genuinely eligible beneficiaries, particularly the elderly and manual labourers, from essential welfare entitlements they were otherwise entitled to receive.

FAQ

Abhyudaya Verma