Ranchi: Bonjh Hembrom, an elderly indigenous farmer in Jharkhand in India’s forested east, walked with difficulty across his home’s earthen courtyard. That week, the 88-year old, who is among the oldest in his village Mundasai in West Singhbhum, asked his son to take him to the village food rations outlet. India has one of the world’s largest food subsidies programs, in which the government must provide subsidized grains every month to 800 million, or the poorest two-thirds of the population, such as Hembrom, under the food security law.
At the ration shop, Hembrom recounted, he was asked to place his fingertips on a device that uses the internet to match them against his biometrics stored in a central server. But after several unsuccessful attempts, the authentication did not go through. He held out his fingers which appeared flat as age has worn them down smooth: “They do not match,” he said. He turned back empty-handed without his food rations.
‘The machine doesn’t recognise me’
Over 250 kms from Hembrom’s village, in Subdega in Odisha’s Sundargarh district, Sukra Oram, 83, an Adivasi who relies on farm work and collecting forest produce was struggling to receive her old age pension of Rs 1,200. At her home made of two huts, Oram pointed to her fingers that have become bent with age, and she can not straighten them enough to put them on a fingerprint scanner. “The machine does not recognize me,” Oram said as she pressed her hands on the mud floor. As she tried to straighten them, her fingers trembled. “I have tried to re-enroll. But it is very challenging.” Besides her pensions, she cannot access her monthly food rations of five kilo rice from the ration shop.
Age has worn down Bonjh Hembrom’s hands and his fingerprints are no longer recognised by the scanners kept at ration outlets. Photo: Anumeha Yadav.
Since 2009, the Indian government has collected personal data – fingerprints, iris scans, photographs – of 1.4 billion residents in its digital identification project “Aadhaar”(meaning, foundation). It is now the world’s largest digital ID program. While presenting it as voluntary to enroll at the start, bureaucrats had argued the program would offer millions of poor who lacked identification a valid ID, prevent fraud and improve efficiency.
By 2021, the government had made access to 312 schemes and public benefits – including food subsidies, pensions and maternity benefits – conditional on enrolling for the biometrics-linked ID. To access social benefits, such as food subsidies, for example, citizens must verify their fingerprints against the biometrics data stored under their unique ID in a central database, by scanning fingers on a machine kept at government’s ration outlets.
‘Reverse of what we were told 10 years ago about Aadhaar’
At the UN Summit of the Future in Egypt in October 2024, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that India is now “ready to share its digital public infrastructure with the world.” Bureaucrats point to the scale of the Aadhaar ID project, linking multiple databases and large numbers of transactions as evidence of India’s digital transformation in governance.
India has entered into an agreement with neighbouring Asian countries such as Sri Lanka to export e-governance software products based on Aadhaar. In 2023, during its G20 presidency, India positioned itself as an exporter of digital governance solutions which it terms “digital public infrastructure”(DPI). A digital ID such as Aadhaar is being considered a “core DPI”.
But activists and researchers have criticised the government’s use of coercion in pushing the use of the digital ID in India’s welfare programs. They say more than a decade since its launch, it lacks accountability and legal remedies – a necessary principle in a framework for a legal digital ID as per the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).
Sukra Oram, who is 82, enrolled in Aadhaar but can no longer perform biometric authentication easily as her hands have changed with old age. Photo: Anumeha Yadav.
“We see the reverse of what we were told 10 years ago on Aadhaar digital infrastructure,” said Nikhil Dey, an activist with the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan Rajasthan, a grassroots movement for the right to work and social security.
“When Aadhaar-based authentication fails, no reason is given to the person why it failed. They are simply told to keep updating their enrolment data. Government said this system would reduce corruption but people have to spend out of pocket on such updates, and even pay extra for bribes. Aadhaar proponents claimed it would be efficient, portable, “paperless”, “seamless”, but one has to wait for weeks and months to get an update or correction to one’s data, and lose out on benefits.”
“The government said it would be ‘inclusive’, but we see mass digital exclusion, especially among the elderly and the poorest,” he added.
Mandatory requirement of Aadhaar for accessing government benefits and services contradicts the 2018 Supreme Court ruling that lack of Aadhaar cannot be a reason to deny anyone services. But the government has continued to expand it through its executive orders.
Among the basic shortcomings of the technology, Dey pointed out, it failed to account for skin roughened by age or work. Problems come up often as fingerprints get altered with old age, physical labour, or disability.
Also read: Modi Took a 180-Degree Turn on Aadhaar, But the ‘I Am Me’ Card’s Flaws Remain
Updating the biometrics in the government database is hard, especially for those with physical difficulties, creating a barrier to access. Disparities in literacy and digital skills determine the residents’ ability to access social services using the ID. Further, for those such as Hembrom and Oram, who miss out on their rights or social benefits, there is no way to seek compensation after they get falsely rejected.
Manoj Bopai, who operated the food ration shop in Hembrom’s village said that he saw several such identification failures every month, especially among the village elders, who “feel harassed”. “They walk miles through the forest to get here, and then, they cannot collect their grains,” said Bopai. “I apply hand sanitizer to their fingers and try each fingerprint. Still, their authentication fails.”
A worn-out finger scanner at a ration outlet in Jharkhand in eastern India. Photo: Anumeha Yadav.
The cost of ‘voluntary’ updates
At their Delhi headquarters, the CEO of the Unique Identity Authority of India (UIDAI), which issues the IDs and manages the data, did not respond to emailed requests for comments.
A media manager at the Ranchi regional office of the agency acknowledged that “with age and for those working fields, or carrying loads manually fingerprints do get erased or changed”. The official said that as a best practice, residents ought to go and update their biometrics data every 5 or 10 years, or more often if they face errors.
Such a “voluntary” update costs residents Rs 100. For citizens who are too old or sick to walk, the official said, the agency had started a “home enrolment” service last year, for which they send an enrollment machine at their homes. This costs Rs 700.
Legal scholar and activist Dr Usha Ramanathan said that the Aadhaar Act of 2016 recognized that the elderly and those with disabilities might struggle with a biometrics-based ID system, but the UIDAI had not created adequate local solutions to their problems. “Officials have known that a biometrics ID will throw up problems such as these,” she said. How can we get over what has become the ‘ground rules’ in this project: that no one needs to answer and no one is liable?”
Unaccountable authentication failures
When a person enrolls in Aadhaar, their data is matched against all existing persons and a unique 12-digit number is assigned. To authenticate a person, their data is matched against their enrollment data stored in a central server.
The Indian government committee’s on biometric standards in its report in 2009 acknowledged that “de-duplication”, i.e. matching biometrics scans against existing scans for uniqueness, had never been done before on the scale of a billion. An analysis by the Privacy International, a UK NGO defending digital rights explains, biometric match scoring which UIDAI relies on is based on statistical probability which varies according to the confidence levels set beforehand, and uniqueness results will vary based on how thoroughly the prints are collected, represented and matched.
The UIDAI, does not state reasons for why someone’s Aadhaar authentication gets rejected, or suspended. It does not publish age-aggregated data on authentication requests. The UIDAI has issued circulars that government agencies ought to provide “exception handling” mechanisms when biometric authentication fails, but these are not always available. For example, rural elderly such as Hembrom and Oram do not own mobile phones to receive ‘one time passwords’ as a bypass for authentication.
UIDAI officials said though there was no mandatory rule, residents would find it useful to update their data every 5 to 10 years.
Research scholars have questioned UIDAI’s logic behind digital databases and if they can fully represent the ground truth of unique individual identities. They have also raised questions about the devastating consequences of exclusion from social welfare schemes this can lead to. Divij Joshi, a doctoral researcher studying the governance of digital societies at the University College London, said that there was a need to increase transparency for unaccountable authentication failures.
“What does it mean when someone says there is a “technical failure” in authentication? Even that much is not clear,” said Joshi. “During the Supreme Court case, the UIDAI stated that it has proprietary algorithms which include its biometric matching algorithms. Because it says these are proprietary, we do not know the mechanism for testing, we do not know how well these are working.”
He explained, “When UIDAI says that if there is an error rate of 12%, for example, we do not know how it was tested, what is the testing benchmark data. Second, we do not know the software bugs in the system which could be audited, no software audit is possible as they say it is proprietary.”
Joshi added that the goal must be to allow more independent insights and monitoring into how the UIDAI sets standards, how it procures and runs its systems, and provide transparent and easily accessible redress for unaccountable authentication failures.
Lack of remedy and redress
The exclusion from Aadhaar is not restricted to rural or remote areas. In a slum in New Delhi, Devaki Bai, who is single and 80 years old, said she could not get her rations for most of 2023 after her fingerprint authentication stopped working in 2022.
Devaki Bai who lives in Delhi, could
not access her food rations for several months due to biometric authentication failures. Photo: Anumeha Yadav.
Delhi ration shops offer the additional facility of iris scanners. But Bai, who had a cataract surgery, said even her iris authentication no longer works. “I wrote a letter to the local magistrate that I am a single, elderly person, and because of my age and physical condition, I cannot afford to spend Rs 100 or make rounds of multiple government offices to get my records updated. But I got no response,” she said. Bai could access her food rations, her legal right, only after Ashok Kumar, an activist with the Delhi Right to Food Campaign filed a Right to Information request to get a representative added to collect grains on her behalf.
“The government must stop treating digital biometric ID as a “single source of truth,” said
Reetika Khera, a development economist at Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi, who has argued against the use of Aadhaar technology in social schemes.
In May 2024, Khera and academic Amod Moharil published research documenting how individuals facing errors in the digital ID records, such as a biometrics mismatch, often make multiple attempts and wait for weeks for a correction.
“We found in our Delhi survey that Aadhaar correction centres are barely functional,” she said. Of the 288 respondents their team surveyed at centres in Delhi, 40% of those facing exclusion from authentication errors had to physically visit the centers more than once to get their data corrected.
The last report of the Comptroller and Auditor General(CAG) of India on Aadhaar in 2022 too flagged that grievance redressal and accountability measures remained inadequate.
The CAG noted, “The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), the agency managing the Aadhaar database, takes no responsibility for deficient biometric capture and the onus of updating biometric is passed on to the Aadhaar number holders.”
It states that the UIDAI made over 30 million biometric updates in one year. Of these, 73% were termed “voluntary” updates, which included those from repeated authentication failures, and for correcting poor quality of biometrics capture at the time of enrolling in the database. The auditor recommended that as the individuals were not at fault in many such cases, the agency may review charging them for updates. But the agency continued to do so.
The audit report noted that till March 31, 2021, the latest data the agency made available, 48,000 cases were pending with UIDAI for resolution. Of these, “7,020 cases were pending for more than 30 days for redressal, of which 496 cases were pending for more than 90 days.” In the interim, these citizens got cut off from basic services.
Dipa Sinha, a researcher working with the Right to Food Campaign, said the evidence showed that the role of decentralised governance was being replaced by tech-solutionism alongside budget cuts in social security. “We were told in initial years that such exclusion caused by mandating the biometric ID in welfare are ‘teething troubles’,” said Sinha. “But we see now that this system is a flawed and disempowering one.”
“Technology is crucial but it cannot replace accountability,” she added. “There is a violation of people’s basic rights because of the coercion going on in the name of “digital public infrastructure(DPI)”.
Before 2016, citizens were allowed to use other government-recognised IDs such as physical Ration Cards issued under the National Food Security Act for welfare schemes, Khera pointed out. The government must allow the use of alternate IDs such as Ration Cards or voter cards, instead of making Aadhaar a prerequisite to access social security.
Anumeha Yadav is a freelance reporter focusing on labour and rural policy. All photos are by Anumeha Yadav.