The beginning of a new year brings reflection and contemplation. What was the past year like, and what will 2026 bring? How do we continue to resist? Like a talisman that we hold onto, here is the judgment of the Supreme Court of India which placed mandatory limitations on the lawful use of Aadhaar: “[the State] shall not unduly expand the scope of ‘subsidies, services and benefits’ thereby widening the net of Aadhaar, where it is not permitted otherwise,” and “an unrestricted extension of the Aadhaar platform to users who may be … private sector operators,” “establishment of a surveillance state,” or any “commercial exploitation” of information is “patently unconstitutional.” K.S. Puttaswamy v Union of India (2019 10 SCC 1).

In the face of this limitation, Aadhaar continues to expand. The UID is now mandatory for over 300 schemes (a 2021 list puts it at 312), many of which provide essential resources like clean drinking water, and multiple non-scheme rights and obligations, like receiving one’s income tax refund. 

We continue to oppose and critique the use of Aadhaar for welfare and social security, and mourn those who died this year after being coercively deprived of their basic rights.

We remember  

Risa Mankadia, who died of hunger on October 22, belonged to a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group in Odisha and was unable to access his PDS rations because he could not complete E-KYC (Know Your Customer) for his ration card in June despite trying repeatedly.

What happened this year

In the last year, we saw both privacy and democracy suffer with the enforcement of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, in November 2025. The Act fails to provide adequate safeguards to citizens against the government aggregating and monetising our data and carrying out expansive surveillance, or from Big Tech profiting from it and subjecting individuals to predatory targeting. It also guts the Right to Information, a hard-won tool for transparency and accountability in government.

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005 has been repealed and replaced with the Viksit Bharat Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) Act, 2025. Among the ways in which the 2025 Act hurts rural workers’ livelihoods and dignity is the imposition of a “biometric attendance system” – despite the fact that as recently as July 2025, the Ministry of Rural Development found serious flaws in an attempted digital attendance system and ordered Gram Panchayats to conduct “100%” physical attendance. 

Earlier this year the LSE Identity project celebrated 20 years of its existence and critique of the 2004 UK biometric identity project that was rolled back in the wake of strong public disapproval. But in October 2025, two decades after the UK’s proposed digital ID, the UK Prime Minister praised Aadhaar, calling it a massive success. Calling on other countries to Beware of Aadhaar, Rethink Aadhaar, along with several other organisations including the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), National Confederation of Dalit Organisations (NACDOR), NREGA Sansharsh Morcha, National Federation of Indian Women (NFIW), the National Platform for the Rights of the Disabled (NPRD), and Internet Freedom Foundation launched the Beware of Aadhaar Campaign as a warning to the global community on Aadhaar as a failed and objectionable model that should not be replicated in other countries. Please read and share it widely, here.

What the future may bring? 

On Christmas Day, The Hindu reported that the NATGRID has been linked to the NPR (National Population Register). NATGRID is a platform set up under the Congress government in 2010, linking government and private databases that can be accessed by the police and investigating agencies. As of the end of this year, NATGRID’s upgraded tools include facial recognition technology and the Ministry of Home Affairs “has asked the States to liberally use the platform to access datasets which includes details of driving licence, vehicle registration, Aadhaar, airline data, bank records, FASTAG, passport and travel details of foreigners and Indians, suspicious transaction reports from Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), railway passengers, and also extract and analyse data from social media posts.” 

The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, begun in Bihar, will continue across the country despite the documented disenfranchisement of voters en masse – illustrating the perils of hasty digitisation with Booth Level Officers required to rely on new digital systems with little training and citizens bearing the consequences of inevitable errors. In just one state, 3.1 million voters have been left out of the first phase of the process because of “glitches” in converting a PDF file to CSV; countless others may find themselves vote-less as the State deepens its dependence on technology in core electoral functions, a trend that now extends beyond enrolment to the act of voting itself through the introduction of mobile-based voting in Bihar’s panchayat elections.

The upcoming digital census in 2027 must be read in the same continuum of institutional stress-testing. Though still to be carried out by enumerators, it places technology and databases at the centre of how people are recorded, carrying forward familiar risks of exclusion, opacity, and administrative overreach.

Is the surveillance state coming or is it already here? What kinds of challenges can we bring to these systems of mass surveillance in the new year? And will we even be left standing after these exercises in exclusion? We demand accountability and #DatabaseSeAazaadi!

2025: A year of resisting coercive technologies

We began the year with a caution against the APAAR ID and its impact on school-going children. For your ease - access explainers, resources on related concerns, and relevant RTI responses on this here. APAAR is now mandatory for CBSE board exams, and despite accounts of increasing exclusions, it continues to spread further. Maharashtra has announced APAAR will be required for all state board examinations as well. 

January 2025 saw the release of draft rules to operationalise the Digital Personal Data Protection Act. The rules fail to introduce any reasonable limitations on government use of people’s personal information, allowing the government to intrude on people’s personal information without limit. Along with other civil society organisations, Rethink convened a public reading of the rules, and was involved in drafting a letter to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology critiquing the manner in which the Rules had been drafted and released. The letter was endorsed by 13 organizations, and over 140 individuals, and submitted to the Ministry. We also prepared a joint submission on the rules with the Article 21 Trust.  

In April 2025, the Election Commission of India’s (ECI) proposed linking Aadhaar cards with the EPIC database. We wrote about how legally unsound and dangerous this was, and highlighted its potential impact on India’s electoral integrity. The statement was endorsed by over 150 individuals and circulated in the media.  

In 2025 we saw more tinkering with electoral integrity with the Special Intensive Revision exercises, which began in Bihar in July. We authored a statement titled “Bihar as the Laboratory of Electoral Mismanagement,” calling for the ECI to immediately suspend the SIR. Of course, not only did that not happen, but the SIR has been extended nationally to 12 more states and union territories, with West Bengal in current focus. A follow-up statement on the issue after the SC’s interim order on Bihar, is here. 

To think together about these growing concerns on citizenship, identity, and documents, and to understand how to witness the events then ongoing in Bihar, we organised a webinar titled “India’s Identity Crisis: Bihar's Special Intensive Revision, Aadhaar and Citizenship”, with scholar Dr Usha Ramanathan, activist Kamayani Swami and editor Santosh Singh in Bihar, advocate Prasanna S, and professor Jean Dreze. The recording of the full webinar is here. 

In June, we focused on the expanding, coercive Aadhaar net, despite recorded exclusions and fraud. In July, our newsletter focussed on voting rights, and rounded up other relevant updates and interesting readings on the issue. In August, we hoped to bring public attention to Aadhaar-enabled grave human rights violations, and included reports and analysis on other technology and digitisation related concerns. Simultaneously, other rights violations continued, affecting privacy and data security, expanding facial recognition, monetising data, and exports of this technology in India’s neighbourhood, most recently in the military junta-ruled Myanmar. 

In September, Professor Jagdeep Chhokar, founder of Association of Democratic Reforms passed away. Prof. Chhokar, among India’s most steadfast advocates for electoral transparency, was among the pioneering thinkers who opposed the linking of Aadhaar to voter ID as ill-thought, illogical and unnecessary in 2021 and campaigned for wide social and political inclusion till the end. We remember him with the deepest respect. 

Till the last weeks of 2025, resistance to forced digitisation and coercion continued – in the form of litigation by anganwadi workers in the Bombay High Court, by government teachers in Maharashtra and a powerful strike by over 2 lakh gig workers. More strength and solidarity to them!

As we enter the new year, and look back on the old, we gather our strength to continue resistance, spread awareness and create and collect resources. We can only do this work with the support of readers and people like you. Please continue to share relevant readings and reports with us, and share our newsletters, resources with others. No2UID and happy new year <3!

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