One of the most appealing claims of the UIDAI project initially was to enable inclusion of the millions of Indians into various government programmes from which they are wrongly excluded. However, the UIDAI did not provide any data on how many Indian residents are without ID documents. There is no reliable estimate of this even today.

In a small survey of 2200 rural households in ten states in 2013, development economists Reetika Khera and Jean Dreze asked about possession of different identity cards (such as a voter ID, ration card, NREGA job card, etc.). They found between 85-95% of respondent households already had one of these IDs. Just over 80% had either a bank or post office passbook. (At that time, only around 15% had Aadhaar numbers.)

UIDAI’S reasoning that the lack of an identity document is the root cause of social exclusion is not backed by any evidence and is based on a flawed understanding of welfare programs.

Ram Lal, a ration card holder in Dhamtari, Chhattisgarh takes his ration of 35 kilo rice home.