One problem is that in everyday use, Aadhaar users often bypass the biometric authentication system. To ensure that people use a genuine address at registration, Aadhaar administrators give people their numbers on an official-looking document. Indians co-opted this paperwork as a proof of identity on its own. And since the document—Indians even call it an “Aadhaar card”—doesn’t have an expiration date, it’s possible for people to get multiple valid cards with different details by changing their address or date of birth. That’s quite a loophole. In 2018 an NGO report found that 67% of people using Aadhaar to open a bank account relied on this verification document rather than digital authentication. That report was the last time anyone published data on the problem, so nobody knows how bad it is today. “Everybody’s living on anecdotes,” says Kiran Jonnalagadda, an anti-Aadhaar activist.
In other cases, flaws in Aadhaar’s biometric technology have caused people to be denied essential government services. The government downplays these risks, but again, it’s impossible to tell how serious the problem is because the UIDAI won’t disclose numbers. “There needs to be a much more honest acknowledgment, documentation, and then an examination of how those exclusions can be mitigated,” says Apar Gupta, director of the Internet Freedom Foundation.
Beyond the potential for fraud, it’s also true that the free and interoperable tools haven’t reached all the people who might find them useful, especially among India’s rural and poorer populations. Nilekani’s hopes for openness haven’t fully come to pass. Big e-commerce companies still dominate, and retail sales on ONDC have been dropping steadily since 2024, when financial incentives to participate began to taper off. The digital payments and government documentation services have hundreds of millions of users, numbers most global technology companies would love to see—but in a country as large as India, that leaves a lot of people out.
Going global
The usually calm Nilekani bristles at that criticism; he has heard it before. Detractors overlook the dysfunction that preceded these efforts, he says, and he remains convinced that technology was the only way forward. “How do you move a country of 1.4 billion people?” he asks. “There’s no other way you can fix it.”
The proof is self-evident, he says. Indians have opened more than 500 million basic bank accounts using Aadhaar; before it came into use, millions of those people had been completely unbanked. Earlier this year, India’s Unified Payments Interface overtook Visa as the world’s largest real-time payments system. “There is no way Aadhaar could have worked but for the fact that people needed this thing,” Nilekani says. “There’s no way payments would have worked without people needing it. So the voice of the people—they’re voting with their feet.”
A street vendor in Kolkata displays a QR code that lets him get paid via India’s Unified Payments Interface, part of the digital public infrastructure Nilekani helped build. The Reserve Bank of India says more than 657 million people used the system in the financial year 2024–2025. DEBAJYOTI CHAKRABORTY/NURPHOTO/GETTY IMAGES
That need might be present in countries beyond India. “Many countries don’t have a proper birth registration system. Many countries don’t have a payment system. Many countries don’t have a way for data to be leveraged,” Nilekani says. “So this is a very powerful idea.” It seems to be spreading. Foreign governments regularly send delegations to Bengaluru to study India’s DPI tools. The World Bank and the United Nations have tried to introduce the concept to other developing countries equally eager to bring their economies into the digital age. The Gates Foundation has established projects to promote digital infrastructure, and Nilekani has set up and funded a network of think tanks, research institutes, and other NGOs aimed at, as he says, “propagating the gospel.”