India’s biometric identity system, Aadhaar, is increasingly held up as a defining example of successful digital governance in the Global South. As the world’s largest biometric identity system, it is framed as proof that population-scale digital infrastructure can be deployed cheaply, efficiently, and at speed. In recent years, Aadhaar has been positioned not merely as a national identification system, but as the foundational layer of India’s “Digital Public Infrastructure” (DPI)— a modular, interoperable set of digital rails that other countries can adopt to modernize welfare delivery and financial inclusion, and achieve digital sovereignty India’s leadership has actively promoted this model on international platforms, presenting Aadhaar as a transferable success story.

India’s G20 presidency in 2022 and this week’s AI Impact Summit, hosted by India, offer an opportunity to demonstrate that Aadhaar and the various DPI solutions designed to work with it position India for digital success globally. This essay argues that Aadhaar’s global appeal has been carefully constructed by foregrounding technological scale and efficiency while managing, minimizing, and selectively erasing its domestic contestations.

Origins, expansion, and increasing concerns

Launched in 2009, Aadhaar began as a far narrower administrative experiment. It was introduced as a voluntary system to provide identity to residents who lacked formal documentation, enabling access to welfare benefits and public services. The promise was compelling: biometric identification would eliminate “ghost beneficiaries,” reduce leakage, and ensure that benefits reached the intended recipients. Aadhaar was embedded in a language of technocratic optimism, endorsed early on by economists, technologists, and development institutions, and framed as a break from an inefficient and corruption-prone welfare state. It also carried significant political symbolism. Aadhaar became a marker of India’s digital modernity, signalling the state’s capacity to govern through data, automation, and technological innovation.

Yet Aadhaar’s foundational claims were limited even at inception. Despite being justified as a solution for those without identity documents, empirical evidence suggests that only a negligible fraction of Aadhaar enrollees— approximately 0.01 percent— were individuals without prior documentation. Aadhaar did not so much create identity as institute an additional identity system with biometric architecture. Moreover, Aadhaar was initially justified as a welfare-specific tool, a framing reflected in its passage as a Money Bill that curtailed parliamentary scrutiny. Its later transformation into a universal identifier was not anticipated in its original legal or policy design.

Universal adoption was achieved through a series of legal, administrative, and infrastructural linkages that made Aadhaar difficult to avoid. SIM cards, bank accounts, tax identification numbers, and cash-based welfare transfers were progressively tied to Aadhaar authentication. What began as a voluntary identifier became an infrastructural prerequisite for participation in everyday civic and economic life. Aadhaar now underpins Electronic Know Your Customer (eKYC) systems, DigiLocker, and a wide range of digital services that together constitute India’s DPI ecosystem. Its expansion was rapid and largely executive-driven, reshaping the relationship between the state, the market, and the individual.

This expansion has not been without cost. Aadhaar’s domestic record includes persistent concerns around welfare exclusion due to biometric failures, privacy and surveillance risks arising from a centralised database, and weak accountability for data breaches and fraud. The Indian Supreme Court has both upheld Aadhaar and recognized privacy as a fundamental right, imposing formal limits on Aadhaar’s scope. In practice, these limits have remained porous. Executive action has outpaced legislative oversight, data protection remains fragile despite recent reforms, and institutional audits have highlighted governance shortcomings without prompting systemic change. These failures are well documented, yet they have not derailed Aadhaar’s trajectory. Instead, they have been managed— framed as implementation issues rather than structural flaws, absorbed into statistical abstraction, or rendered less visible over time.

Global narrative and policy implications

It is precisely at this moment of unresolved domestic contestation that Aadhaar’s international career has accelerated. Through successive rebrandings, from Aadhaar to India Stack to Digital Public Infrastructure, the system has been recast as neutral infrastructure rather than a contested political project. In global policy discourse, Aadhaar is no longer discussed primarily as a biometric ID programme, but as a set of digital “rails” that enable efficient service delivery. This reframing is crucial to its exportability. By stripping Aadhaar of its constitutional, social, and political context, it can be presented as modular, open, and adaptable across jurisdictions.

India’s efforts to promote Aadhaar internationally operate on multiple levels. Indirectly, global development institutions have increasingly favored digital ID architectures that resemble Aadhaar: centralized databases, interoperability across government services, and rapid population-scale adoption. While formally acknowledging the existence of multiple models, policy frameworks and technical assistance have often privileged Aadhaar-like designs, particularly for developing countries seeking quick digital transformation. These models are presented as pragmatic and cost-effective solutions to governance challenges, with limited attention to their long-term implications for rights and accountability.

Direct promotion has been more explicit. India has signed memoranda of understanding with at least ten countries— including Kenya, Tanzania, Sierra Leone, Armenia, and Colombia — to share “successful digital solutions” implemented at a population scale. Aadhaar’s administrator, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), has worked with international organizations such as the World Bank and the United Nations to take Aadhaar technology and expertise overseas. Parallel initiatives, such as the Modular Open Source Identity Platform (MOSIP), have sought to package Aadhaar’s architecture into exportable, open-source systems, further lowering the barriers to adoption. Together, these efforts position India not just as a user of digital identity systems but as a global supplier of digital governance infrastructure.

Multilateral platforms have enabled India to amplify this narrative. At the G20, India framed the current decade as a “TechAde,” presenting itself as a test case for the success of digital public infrastructure. In these spaces, Aadhaar is invoked as evidence that DPI can deliver inclusion, efficiency, and scale in the Global South. The language is aspirational and forward-looking, emphasizing opportunity rather than risk. Discussions of Aadhaar’s domestic contestations—judicial challenges, welfare exclusions, coercive adoption— are largely absent from these global conversations.

What Aadhaar’s export reveals is not merely the spread of a technology, but the circulation of a particular governance logic. Aadhaar travels as an abstraction: a promise of scale without context, efficiency without rights, and infrastructure without politics. The conflicts that shaped Aadhaar’s operation in India are treated as local anomalies rather than integral features of the system. This abstraction allows Aadhaar to be presented as a plug-and-play solution, even though its functioning has depended on a specific— and contested—constitutional, legal, and social environment.

The implications of this translation are significant. When Aadhaar-like systems are adopted in countries with weaker judicial oversight, limited data protection, or authoritarian governance structures, the risks associated with biometric identity systems intensify. Digital ID can become a tool for surveillance, exclusion, and control, particularly when embedded in welfare and security regimes. By exporting Aadhaar as neutral infrastructure, its promoters understate the political choices and trade-offs that such systems entail.

Ultimately, Aadhaar’s global success depends less on having resolved its domestic failures than on having learned how to contain them. The system’s exportability rests on narrative strategies that foreground technological achievement while backgrounding democratic costs. Evaluating digital governance systems solely through the lenses of scale, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness obscures deeper questions about consent, accountability, and constitutional legitimacy. As Aadhaar continues to circulate as a global model, it raises a pressing question: whether digital public infrastructure can be meaningfully separated from the political and legal contexts that shape its operation— or whether, in the process of abstraction, what is exported is not just infrastructure, but a deeply consequential vision of state power.