Indian politicians like to claim that their governance innovations — particularly digital public infrastructure that is shared between the state and the private sector — are widely admired. They can even point to the occasional testimonial from the leader of another developing nation.
However, last week they bagged an unusual prize: British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said that India’s digital “unique ID” system, Aadhaar, was a “massive success,” and that he hoped to learn from it in rolling out the UK’s equivalent.
Starmer was visiting India and met with Aadhaar architect Nandan Nilekani — who is also the non-executive chairman of the information technology services giant Infosys Ltd. He hopefully spent some of that time asking how best to avoid political blowback when the program inevitably metastasizes into something much larger than planned.
Illustration: Yusha
When Aadhaar was first proposed almost two decades ago, it was meant to be strictly voluntary — an additional, light-weight form of identification for those who struggled to access government services. The British government has promised something similar: The card would only be mandatory for those about to start a new job to prove that they have a legal right to work.
However, of course, some Britons might want to use it for other things. It would be a convenient replacement for more complicated forms of identity verification.
As Starmer said: “I don’t know how many times the rest of you have had to look in the bottom drawer for three bills when you want to get your kids into school or apply for this or apply for that — drives me to frustration.”
Judging from India’s experience, British bureaucrats would be as willing to expand the use of digital ID. They would wind up redesigning the access to services around the presence of the ID — whether to save money, eliminate fraud or reduce wait times. First, you would need it for your taxes, then for your pension and then you would be encouraged to link it to your national health service account.
Every additional step will appear reasonable, defensible and incremental. However, it would end up with the ID being effectively mandatory. Today, it is virtually impossible to get anything done in India without an Aadhaar.
I held out on getting one for the longest possible time. It was only when the Indian Supreme Court in 2018 permitted the income tax department to require taxpayers to submit their ID numbers that I gave in.
The UK probably has more safeguards against such mission creep than India did. Our judges put the “right to dignity,” which they said universal ID enabled, over a right to privacy, and British judges might well disagree.
However, it is also true, in retrospect, that most of our worries about the Aadhaar were overdone. Indian officials over the past few years have faced multiple (unproven) accusations of snooping on their citizens — but none of these allegations involved the use of the digital ID system.
Whether our data are truly secure might not be certain. In 2023, there were reports that more than 800 million Aadhaar database entries were on sale in the untamed depths of the Internet. We braced ourselves for an epidemic of identity theft, but nothing out of the ordinary happened. While fraud using stolen Aadhaar numbers is indeed an ongoing problem, it is also a very small subset of the universe of terrifying scams that Indians have to navigate daily.
Meanwhile, the digital ID’s benefits are easy for even skeptics to see. Millions of previously unserved people have been able to enter the formal financial system — take out loans, save in specialized accounts and receive payments from far away.
Most importantly, many poor Indians no longer struggle to prove their identity to access government-rationed food or cash transfers. The middlemen who used to take a cut of these benefits in return for easier access are now reduced to helping them set up their Aadhaar accounts.
The private sector has taken to the digital ID system like a duck to water. Bank accounts can be opened in seconds. SIM cards for mobile phones, which once took days to organize in security-conscious India, could now be accessed almost instantly. I am still reluctant to hand out my Aadhaar number and use alternatives wherever possible. However, truthfully, that behavior is more reflexive than it is considered.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is quick to sense when his voters are happy. The Aadhaar project was started before he took office, but he quickly adopted it and has run on its benefits ever since. The fact that he regularly trumpets it as an achievement is perhaps the most significant indication of how popular it now is.
Starmer must be a little startled by how loud the opposition to an ID card is in the UK — all but two of the EU’s 27 countries have something similar. However, the chances are that, if he perseveres, Britons would get used to it. I certainly have.
Mihir Sharma is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A senior fellow at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi, he is author of Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy.
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