“India Stack” is the umbrella term that the IT industry, through iSPIRT and allied actors, uses to brand the bundle of state systems built on top of Aadhaar from around 2012 onwards. The pieces include Aadhaar identity and Aadhaar‑based biometric authentication (ABBA), the UPI and Aadhaar‑enabled payment rails (AePS), e‑KYC, eSign, DigiLocker, the Account Aggregator framework, FASTag (mandatory by law), the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission, ONDC and a growing list of “Digital Public Infrastructure” (DPI) layers in welfare, health, education and commerce.
We view Aadhaar, and therefore India Stack, as a failed and objectionable model that should not be replicated in other countries. The case is set out in full in our Campaign 2025 statement; in short:
- A centralised database of biometrics and demographics is a dangerous tool of social control, especially in the hands of an authoritarian government.
- The coercive “seeding” of Aadhaar into ration cards, job cards, pension lists, bank accounts and voter rolls magnifies the danger of profiling, surveillance and exclusion. It has produced real harm to lakhs of people, including Aadhaar‑linked starvation deaths.
- Biometric failures and database errors are a permanent source of exclusion: for the elderly, for manual workers whose fingerprints have worn smooth, and for marginalised people who never received a working Aadhaar in the first place.
- Aadhaar has been a law unto itself, rolled out without any legal backing, passed through Parliament by bypassing the Upper House, and routinely defying Supreme Court orders.
What is being exported under the brand “India Stack” is this same architecture, dressed up in the language of “open public infrastructure”. We urge the greatest caution from countries considering its replication, for the same reasons we resist its use here.
→ Read our full statement: Beware of Aadhaar — A Warning on India’s Biometric Identity Model (Campaign 2025, released on Human Rights Day, 10 December 2025).
→ Further reading on the architectural critique: India Stack Watch — a structured framework (Five Tests, Evidence, Components, Framework) examining India Stack as Digital Public Infrastructure. CC0; fork-able.