Rethink
Aadhaar

We are deeply concerned that efforts are being made to promote biometric identity systems similar to Aadhaar in other countries.

Aadhaar is India’s unique identity number, linked with a person’s biometrics — fingerprints, iris, photograph. Rolled out from 2009 onwards in close collaboration with the IT industry, it was supposed to be voluntary but quickly became as good as compulsory: most social benefits are now out of reach without it.

For our part, we view Aadhaar as a failed and objectionable model that should not be replicated in other countries.

Our main concerns

1. A centralised database of biometrics and demographics is a dangerous tool of social control — especially, but not only, in the hands of an authoritarian government.

2. Linking Aadhaar to numerous databases magnifies the risk of profiling, surveillance and exclusion. A single point of failure also creates serious data‑security risk.

3. The non‑biometric Aadhaar data is freely shared with authorised users of Aadhaar authentication, with minimal safeguards. This is a major infringement of privacy.

4. The demographic details in the database are full of errors from a hasty rollout. Severe restrictions on correction force people to align other documents with unreliable data — endless hassle, especially for the poor.

5. Biometric failures cause exclusion, especially for the elderly. The system was rolled out without any transparency about the reliability of authentication.

6. A significant minority of people, mainly from marginalised groups, do not have Aadhaar through no fault of their own — and are excluded from most social benefits.

7. A lost Aadhaar number is very hard to retrieve. Poor people have made long, expensive trips to assistance centres; some never recovered theirs and are now deprived of all social benefits.

8. Coercive “seeding” of Aadhaar with ration cards, job cards, pension lists, bank accounts, voter lists and more is a monumental waste of time for officials and citizens alike.

9. Update queues run for hours with no guarantee of remedy, no grievance‑tracking, no continuity of assistance. People’s time and money are wasted to no end.

10. Far from rooting out corruption, the centralised database has reduced transparency. Integration with the banking system has magnified exposure to identity fraud.

11. Aadhaar has been a law unto itself. It began without legal backing. The Aadhaar Act bypassed the Upper House. UIDAI regularly violates Supreme Court orders and a critical provision for parliamentary oversight was dropped from the final Act.

The promoters of Aadhaar were never able to justify this particular identity model or to explain what ills it is supposed to remedy. Instead, they relied on propaganda. Many countries have functional identity systems that are less coercive, invasive, exclusionary and unreliable than Aadhaar.

We urge the greatest caution from countries considering replication of the Aadhaar model.

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See the full list of 50+ signatories on the Campaign 2025 page →

A growing list of articles and reports documenting the risks of Aadhaar →