Rethink Aadhaar Newsletter September-October 2025
Note to readers: We are able to compile these updates because readers send us relevant information. If you think something is worth sharing widely, please send it to us and we will try to include it in the updates. Email: contact@rethinkaadhaar.in @no2UID
Coercive digitisation violates fundamental rights:
Harsh digital coercion in Aadhaar-linked systems has caused yet another starvation death in India’s interior villages.
Risa Mankadia, a single elderly man who belonged to a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group in Odisha was unable to get his rice rations after he was not able to complete E-KYC(Know Your Customer) for his Antodaya – meant for the poorest of the poor families – ration card in June despite trying repeatedly.
He died of hunger on October 22, noted the Right to Food Campaign. Earlier, activists have investigated more than 20 deaths where those with fragile livelihoods and who faced chronic hunger have starved after officials cut off their food and welfare rights for not enrolling in Aadhaar or failing to link their details online to Aadhaar.
Rethink Aadhaar demands an investigation into Mankadia’s death and accountability from the union government and Odisha officials and companies running Aadhaar systems for the denial of vital social security in Mankadia’s final months.The union government has tried to market and export Aadhaar biometric ID to other countries such as Sri Lanka. More recently, the UK government advertised its own digital ID card with claims that the switch to Aadhar saved India’s government over $10bn each year, a dubious claim that has never been proven. In the backdrop of Mankadia’s death was the fact that the Odisha government and the Union government were denying 15.66 lakh families their right to food merely because they have been unable to do the re-KYC process. These families will stop getting subsidised food and bear the burden of proving their KYC and the government capitalises on denials showing these as “savings”.
Digital ID for children is creating new roadblocks to the right to education: The APAAR ID’s restrictive and centralised requirements are excluding children from schools, potentially resulting in not recognising their credentials and ineligibility for crucial examinations. A “single misplaced letter, a placeholder birthday, or a typo made years ago by an overworked teacher can derail a child's education.” APAAR was rolled out as a diktat to schools, without any consultation, following the Aadhaar playbook.
For more on APAAR, see the following videos:
PART 1| APAAR ID अपार आईडी स्वैच्छिक होने पर भी क्यों हो रही है ज़बरदस्ती? Is APAAR ID safe? – https://youtu.be/4ntjK0rOWwk
PART 2 | APAAR ID की ज़बरदस्ती? क्या है आपके अधिकार! APAAR ID being forced? Know your Rights! – https://youtu.be/-2q5k4hLPkg
Our January update contains links to resources, explainers, important RTIs on APAAR ID
The Meghalaya government is insisting on Aadhaar production by applicants for an SC/ST scholarship but the Meghalaya High Court has held, as an interim measure, that applicants cannot be disqualified for non-production of Aadhaar. Meanwhile, the Meghalaya government has acknowledged that QR codes can be tampered with in its push to use a specific application to scan and verify Aadhaar QR codes.
The vulnerabilities of a digital vaccine certification system – COWIN – have been exposed as the COWIN portal was inaccessible for multiple weeks in August and September, affecting people’s right to travel and access their own health records.
People with loans may soon be locked out of their mobile phone — a lifeline for people in India today — at the whims of lenders in case of default. The extreme consequences of permitting a lender to control a person’s access to their phone in “Digital India” cannot be overstated – consumer activists warn that “This practice weaponizes access to essential technology to enforce behavioural compliance, locking users out of livelihoods, education, and financial services until repayment.”
Aadhaar is a hurdle even for switching to environment-friendly solar power in UP: “mismatches between the names in the electricity department records and the Aadhaar cards” cause problems for people simply trying to get loans for their solar power equipment under central schemes.
Digitisation is causing rampant risks to privacy and information security:
Activist Srinivas Kodali’s complaint to the Chief Electoral Officer, Telangana alleging misuse of personal data has revealed serious abuse of personal information by the state government.
The Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) of Telangana has admitted that the personal information of voters in the state from the ECI database was shared with the state government, allegedly to link voter IDs with Aadhaar, and the data was used for different purposes after that without the ECI’s permission – including creation of a facial recognition system – a flawed form of algorithmic identity verification. This comes after the CEO initially denied the allegations.
Access to the data was not limited by the State government – it was shared with a private company to create a pensioner verification system.
The incident highlights the impossibility of preventing misuse of data once aggregated by any government body, and serves as a reminder that India still does not have a functioning data protection law which could potentially hold the government – as a data fiduciary – responsible for unauthorised and unlawful use and dissemination of personal data.
In the absence of any limitation on use of data by governments, Maharashtra and Rajasthan are planning to monetise the personal information of welfare scheme beneficiaries — including name, age, gender, religion, caste, income range, assets and education, and links to vehicle ownership, tax status, and health records. This information may be made available to private companies for their “market research” — a blatantly unlawful use of personal data collected for a completely different purpose, without any consent from the individuals or any perceptible public interest.
Companies which develop facial recognition technologies for the state to surveil people are often the same companies involved in facial recognition for other uses – for example, mobile voting in local elections, raising more questions about governments misusing personal data.
Meanwhile, Aadhaar use and digitisation expands:
The 2027 Census exercise will likely bring new challenges and risks for privacy and inclusion:
The multiple technological measures proposed for information collection raise issues of “privacy, data protection, and the potential for state-led surveillance” and “India’s vulnerability to cyberattacks amplifies these risks, threatening both the integrity of the census process and the security of citizens’ data.”
Census enumerators and supervisors will use their own mobile phones to collect people’s intimate personal information in 2027 — with no regard for the security and integrity of the information or how the supervisors may use it.
The UIDAI plans to permit facial authentication through Aadhaar for online transfers of high amounts – without any evaluation of whether this will affect the real problem of scammers and digital fraud when the person’s face is authenticated, or how many people will need to update their biometrics to be able to transfer their own money.
Aadhaar in an armistice agreement: The MHA and Manipur Government will require Kuki-Zo insurgent groups to obtain Aadhaar cards and link them to their bank accounts in order to access the stipend they are entitled to under a 2008 pact.
After the Supreme Court directed the ECI to accept Aadhaar as proof of identity during the Special Intensive Revision, the ECI will also accept Aadhaar as proof of identity for voters who are on the electoral roll but do not have a physical voter ID card.
Simultaneously, the ECI is deploying new “tech-enabled” voter ID cards just weeks two months ahead of the Bihar assembly elections, which have already served as an experiment ground for the Special Intensive Revision. These will require fresh applications and downloads to registered mobile numbers risking further exclusion from the electoral process.
Despite evidence of fake or misused Aadhaar by ticket-booking bots on IRCTC through Tatkal, the platform has made it mandatory to use Aadhaar to book even reserved general tickets during the first 15 minutes of the opening of general reservation.
Labour skills will be digitised in a “real-time” labour market information system which is in the works and will reportedly use “AI” and machine learning to work — but it is unclear which sources data will be collected from, or which issues the specific use of AI and ML is aimed at resolving.
The UIDAI CEO insists that Aadhaar is not “functional” but a foundational ID and fraud is not a problem — while fake Aadhaars are the reason for repeated verification and for non-acceptance as proof of anything.
Aadhaar and digitisation continue to make money for others:
26% of Jan Dhan accounts in public sector banks are inoperative — raising concerns about the real value of these accounts for the general public, and whether the banks are doing anything to improve accessibility for their customers once on-boarded and recorded as a win for “Digital India”.
The private company Protean eGov Technologies saw its shares surge 11% after UIDAI awarded it a work order worth ₹1,160 crore to run district-level Aadhaar Seva Kendras (ASKs). Experts and scholars like Reetika Khera have documented how dysfunctional and dystopian ASKs can be, causing bureaucratic nightmares for people dealing with demographic or biometric errors and updations.
Online real-money gaming has succeeded, making private companies rich, due to the “spread of UPI, cheap smartphones, cheaper data” and in the process, have led to addiction and huge financial losses for Indians. “Behind flashy apps and jackpots lies a complex web of mule accounts, payouts and payment tricks that move thousands of crores beyond the screen.”
Related reading:
What does “digital sovereignty” mean: Do Indian companies pursue the goals of Indians, or their government?
Aadhaar for the UK? Not quite: Although the UK announced plans for a biometric digital identity system in the UK “Brit Card” to serve as a work permit, this is neither a wholesale approval of Aadhaar, nor a certainty. More than 1.6 million people have opposed the plan, describing it as “a step towards mass surveillance and digital control” which would put “incredibly sensitive information” at risk. Indians are sharing lessons from Aadhaar to warn against any mandatory biometric ID, highlighting the human rights violations caused by social and economic exclusion and the lack of privacy and oversight.
Reportage in Jacobin on India’s “Citizenship by algorithm”: How Aadhaar is being used to “undertake a biometric, religious, and genealogical project of redefining citizenship”.
State surveillance in Pakistan: An Amnesty Tech report warns that “Pakistan is developing one of the world's most comprehensive surveillance programmes outside China.” The framework includes a phone-tapping system that can surveil at least 4 million phones at any given time, and an internet firewall that can block two million active internet sessions at once. Amnesty has documented the involvement of a nexus of companies based in Germany, France, United Arab Emirates (UAE), China, Canada, and the United States.
The internet as a forum for democratic movements in Nepal and Bangladesh, and lessons for regulation in India: The use of platforms like Discord in the recent uprising in Nepal highlight the internet's evolving role in democracy — it can be used for effective and safe communication and mobilisation but can also serve as a carrier of misinformation or propaganda. India should avoid digital authoritarianism, recognizing its incompatibility with democratic and economic goals.
The labour behind the technology: “Thousands of ‘overworked, underpaid’ humans train Google’s AI to seem smart”.