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India’s Aadhaar digital ID was sold as a tool to deliver faster, cleaner social welfare and yet it resulted in a digital welfare divide. By 2021, a staggering 1.4 billion residents were enrolled, covering about 90% of the population. The government even made Aadhaar mandatory for hundreds of schemes – in fact, access to 312 welfare programs (rations, pensions, maternal benefits, etc.) was conditioned on Aadhaar by the end of 2021.
In theory, Aadhaar authentication would cut out fraud and ghost beneficiaries. In practice, it has shuttered benefits for millions of the very people it was supposed to help. Post-2016, as states rushed to link PDS (ration cards), pensions and other entitlements to Aadhaar, deeply vulnerable families suddenly found themselves unable to collect food, cash or jobs – often declared “ineligible” or even “dead” by automated systems.
But Indian law and courts had foreseen these dangers. Section 7 of the Aadhaar Act (2016) explicitly guarantees that no one should be denied welfare for lack of Aadhaar; and the Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that lack of Aadhaar “cannot be a reason to deny anyone services”.
Despite this, government notifications effectively made it compulsory for all public distribution, pensions, MGNREGA wages and more. The result was a digital welfare crisis. Millions of genuine beneficiaries – the old, disabled, tribal, migrant and poorest – were locked out by biometric failures, data mismatches, connectivity gaps and opaque algorithms.
This report, based on government data, court orders and dozens of on-the-ground interviews, reveals the human cost of this process. From the dusty ration shops of Jharkhand to Telangana’s algorithmic welfare portals, we document how Aadhaar authentication errors have led to hunger and despair.
We hear from the victims themselves: the elderly widow whose pension stopped, the family forced to starve, the single mother told her fingerprints didn’t exist. We also consult officials and legal experts who warn that this is the predictable outcome of mandating a flawed system. Comparative examples from Kenya, Nigeria and the UK show that India is not alone: digital identity schemes without safeguards inevitably exclude the most marginalized.
In the end, the evidence is stark: instead of lifting the poor, the Aadhaar linkage is widely accused of erasing them. As one activist put it, “the government said it would be inclusive, but we see mass digital exclusion, especially among the elderly and the poorest”. The poorest Indians are paying with their food, their pensions, even their lives.
Mandating Aadhaar Digital Welfare Divide: From Law to Practice
By 2017 the government had invoked Section 7 of the Aadhaar Act to link Aadhaar to subsidies and services. A Union Ministry circular (July 2017) stated that anyone eligible for subsidized food grains or cash transfers under the National Food Security Act must furnish an Aadhaar number or authenticate with Aadhaar.
Those without Aadhaar were given a deadline (extended to Sept 2017) to get enrolled. In effect, what was supposed to be a voluntary ID system became mandatory for the poorest. Similar orders followed for job schemes and pensions. By 2021, Aadhaar was inextricably woven into India’s welfare delivery system.
Officially, Aadhaar’s purpose was to bring transparency and efficiency. Press releases touted that seeding Aadhaar would reduce fake beneficiaries and leakages in the PDS. A 2017 press note from the Food Ministry explicitly linked Aadhaar to NFSA food entitlements. The statement explained that Aadhaar “obviates the need for producing multiple documents” and was meant to simplify delivery. Jan Aadhaar (a separate state database) was later introduced in places like Rajasthan to record beneficiaries’ details for pensions, further ensuring digital linkage.
In practice, however, these policies ignored the ground realities. The elderly, disabled and illiterate often could not navigate biometric authentication. Many poor people lack fixed addresses, mobile phones or documents required even to prove their identity.
The Aadhaar Act itself even acknowledges that those with worn fingerprints or disabilities may face problems, but no robust safeguards were put in place. As Aadhaar co-founder Usha Ramanathan notes, “Officials have known that a biometrics ID will throw up problems such as these… Yet no one is liable”.
The Supreme Court had warned against exactly this scenario. In the 2018 Aadhaar judgment, justices declared that welfare benefits cannot be denied solely because someone lacks an Aadhaar.
Section 7 of the Aadhaar Act was meant to protect beneficiaries, by requiring only that they apply for Aadhaar (if eligible) but not penalizing them if they didn’t have it yet. In the real world, though, bureaucrats and administrators often acted as if the law was reversed: no Aadhaar meant no ration, no pension, no work.
“Instead of being a tool of inclusion, the Aadhaar system became a digital whip,” wrote policy experts in 2018. Over 25% of ration card holders in pioneering states like Rajasthan could not draw their food grains after Aadhaar was made mandatory.
In some areas, entire blocks saw tens of thousands of pensioners vanish from the rolls overnight. As one activist commented, “The onus is on the citizen to prove their identity, when it really should be with the state. How can you expect such people, the most marginalized of the poor, to spend their lives running after the government?”.
An 82-year-old tribal widow in Odisha’s Sundargarh district sits distraught at a fair-price shop, unable to authenticate her Aadhaar fingerprintsm.thewire.inm.thewire.in.
She told reporters, “The machine does not recognise me… I have tried to re-enroll. But it is very challenging.” The photo of her (above) captures the frailty of those most affected: elderly hands with worn fingerprints, a rural shop with intermittent power and sketchy internet. As a ration shopkeeper in nearby Jharkhand recounts: “They [the elders] walk miles… and then they cannot collect their grains…
I apply hand sanitizer to their fingers and try each fingerprint. Still, their authentication fails.” Each failed authentication can mean a family goes hungry.
Millions Barred from Rations and Pensions
Public Distribution System (PDS). India’s food security law mandates subsidized grain for roughly 800 million people(about two-thirds of the population) each month. In theory, Aadhaar seeding was supposed to ensure only the right people got grain. In practice, errors and system failures meant many legitimate beneficiaries were excluded.
Recent surveys confirm this at scale. A 2018 report by IDinsight (sponsored by Omidyar Network) found that in Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan and West Bengal some 20 lakh (2 million) people were being denied PDS rations each month due to Aadhaar-related issues.
These were not fringe cases: in Rajasthan over 2% of beneficiaries were cut off by Aadhaar glitchesmoneylife.in. Across India, even a modest 1-2% exclusion translates into tens of millions. Biometric mismatches were a major cause: for instance, Rajasthan officials noted about 1.2% of PDS beneficiaries faced exclusion due to failed fingerprint scans. (They also admitted that UIDAI’s own data suggests actual failure rates are much higher.)
Caught in this digital trap were the poorest and hardest to reach. Many had never had Aadhaar in the first place, because they live in remote hamlets or are too old to travel to enrollment centers. Yet when their ration cards were “seeded” into the system, those cards could mysteriously vanish or be marked invalid.
In Jharkhand’s Simdega district, a tragic case made national news: eleven-year-old Santoshi Kumari died of starvation in 2017, after her family was denied rations for eight months because their card wasn’t linked to Aadhaar. Activists have documented numerous similar stories of children and elders quietly dying under such circumstances. In Jharkhand’s data, at least 10% of families were unable to buy their PDS rations after biometric linking – which translates to roughly 2.5 million people in that state alone.
These failures were not limited to Odisha and Jharkhand. In Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and other states, journalists found frequent scenes of helpless villagers being turned away empty-handed. At a November 2018 farmers’ fair in Rajasthan, a 55-year-old woman named Sita stood in the queue: “I have no Aadhaar card, I don’t know why they say my fingerprints don’t show,” she explained.
“Without Aadhaar I am denied work under MGNREGA, and get no rations. I am a single woman with no other income. What will I eat, and how will I survive?”. Such testimony became emblematic – as one writer noted, these women speak with “the clarity of experience that comes from being the object of a mass experiment where exceptions and exclusions are diabolically counted as proof of success.”
Even when people had Aadhaar, simple human errors compounded the crisis. In one Rajasthan village, two unrelated women named Bhuri Bai fell victim to a computer mistake. Because they shared the same name, the shopkeeper’s tablet linked one woman’s fingerprint to the other’s Aadhaar.
As a result, one Bhuri Bai family received both households’ wheat for months, leaving the other starved. One victim described it: “In August and September our family didn’t get any ration, as the other Bhuri Bai gave her thumb impression and took our share of 25 kg… the dealer told us to adjust for some time and ask her for 20 kg,” she said. It took month-long intervention for the error to be corrected, and even then both families remained fearful to re-enroll their biometrics.
Worn-out Aadhaar fingerprint scanners have become a symbol of this failure. In Jharkhand’s fair price shops, many devices (like the one shown above) are old and battered, often unable to read coarse or smeared fingerprints.
State-level auditors note that basic infrastructure (power, internet) is patchy in rural areas. When machines fail, there is often no human fallback: states like Odisha and Jharkhand removed their earlier “manual override” options to avoid fraud, leaving beneficiaries completely stuck.
The result: in many villages, officials openly admit to finger-printing woes. “We’re taking data from Jan Aadhaar now,” said a Rajasthan official, “but if someone is not on it, they shouldn’t be deprived of receiving their pensions” – yet millions of grain cards and pensions have already been cut off in haste.
Pensions and Elderly: The havoc in Rajasthan’s pension system has been perhaps the starkest example of Aadhaar exclusion. In December 2022 the state abruptly mandated Aadhaar e-KYC for all pensions. Within months, lakhs of elderly saw their benefits disappear. One widely publicized case was that of 92-year-old Dhapu Devi. Without any Aadhaar number or even a Jan Aadhaar card, Dhapu Devi relied on her voter and ration cards to prove identity.
Yet local officials mistakenly marked her as “dead” in the system. Her family petitioned repeatedly: her grandson notes that officials initially listed her as dead, then “member record deleted on Jan Aadhaar,” and finally the record was removed entirely.
Dhapu Devi’s daughter-in-law Bhagwati Kumar seethed at the injustice: “They said she’s dead, but here she is sitting alive next to me,” she said, stroking her 92-year-old mother-in-law’s frail arm. Even a letter from the village headman asserting Dhapu’s life did not restore her Rs.1,000 monthly pension.
Rajasthan journalist reports show thousands of such cases. After e-KYC, some pensioners were incorrectly listed as “out of state” or struck off due to minor data mismatches. As a result, over 13.5 lakh (1.35 million) of the state’s 90 lakh pensioners lost access to payments at one point.
ThePrint’s ground investigation highlighted one particularly tragic incident: 103-year-old Mena Rama was pronounced dead by the authorities. “In another world, 103-year-old Mena Rama would be dead. The Rajasthan government thought so too,” reports noted.
In reality she lay on her charpoy alive; yet her Rs.500 widow pension and 35 kg of food rations stopped entirely starting Dec 2022. “She hasn’t received [them] in nearly two years,” said her family. By the time this article went to print, Mena and millions like her still had no relief.
Rajasthan’s government eventually admitted the crisis – ordering pensions to be immediately restored where e-KYC had failed. Directors explained that pension payments would now be retrieved from the separate Jan Aadhaar database, and officials were told not to cut off elders for technical reasons.
But critics argue this merely replaced one barrier with another. As one deputy director candidly noted, Aadhaar is “not mandatory,” but Jan Aadhaar has become the norm in practice. Even so, many poor pensioners (including single elderly women and disabled persons) remain off the grid.
In March 2024, for example, Rajasthan refused all new disability pension claims because their Aadhaar-led data could not sync with the national disability database – effectively locking out hundreds of thousands of disabled people from receiving months of support.
Other States: Outside Rajasthan, similar stories emerged. In Odisha’s tribal areas, Mazdoor Kisan Sangathan (MKSS) activists found many losing work and rations. Rajasthan’s MKSS founder Nikhil Dey commented on this trend: “The government said it would be ‘inclusive’, but we see mass digital exclusion, especially among the elderly and the poorest,”he noted.
He argued that these exclusions were not accidental: “When Aadhaar-based authentication fails, no reason is given, and beneficiaries are branded ‘frauds’ or ‘ghosts’,” he said, echoing numerous field reports. In Telangana, the rollout of an AI-based welfare platform called Samagra Vedika brought its own blacklist.
Families were rejected from the government’s subsidized food card scheme because Samagra’s algorithm erroneously flagged them as owning cars or having government jobs. One petitioner, Maher Bee, lives in Hyderabad with five children and a paralyzed husband. When her family applied in 2018 for a ration card, Samagra tagged them as owning a four-wheeler – which they did not.
They were denied grains for three years. “Instead of paying ₹3, we spend ₹10 for every kilogram of rice,” Maher told reporters, adding that they now buy government rice at high market rates from black-market dealers.
Her High Court petition finally found in her favor: in Nov 2023 the Telangana High Court ruled she was “eligible” for the food card and ordered reissuance. But other families remain locked out; even now NGOs warn that any digital vetting algorithm will have “no accountability whatsoever” if mistakes arise.
Comparative Perspectives: A Global Trend?
India’s struggles are not unique. Digital ID schemes around the world have shown troubling exclusion. In Kenya, the Huduma Namba biometric ID project faced legal challenges in 2019 and 2020 over privacy and equity. Kenyan courts insisted on safeguards, noting that automated identity databases risk “excluding” marginalized communities.
Privacy International’s analysis of the Kenyan ruling warns that “identity systems can lead to exclusion, with individuals not being able to access goods and services to which they are entitled” – a direct echo of India’s experience.
Nigeria’s drive to link mobile SIMs and bank accounts to a national ID has similarly meant that many poor rural residents (who cannot easily obtain the National Identification Number) are cut off from communication and financial services. Activists report that mandatory ID costs (like paying for mobile registration) disproportionately burden the poor. (For example, a recent report noted that correcting a simple birthdate error on Nigeria’s ID costs over one-third of the country’s minimum monthly wage.)
Even in rich countries, digitized welfare can fail vulnerable groups. In the UK, Universal Credit – a fully digital, means-tested benefits system – has been criticized for leaving claimants in limbo. A Guardian investigation found that the government’s automated fraud-detection algorithm wrongly flagged over 200,000 housing benefit claims as suspicious over three years.
Two-thirds of those flagged claims were in fact legitimate; but claimants were still subjected to invasive investigations and delays. Human Rights Watch has issued a stinging report on Universal Credit, warning that a “poorly designed algorithm” is “pushing people into poverty,” driving them to skip meals or go into debt.
Many British claimants lack reliable internet or have difficulty with online forms and ID checks. As HRW noted, the system’s digital barriers – from cumbersome online registration to opaque eligibility rules – have left disabled people, migrants and the long-term unemployed even more destitute during a cost-of-living crisis. In short, automation without safeguards often shunts the disadvantaged to the back of the queue.
These international parallels underscore a basic lesson: digitizing welfare does not guarantee inclusion. Without robust offline alternatives and error-correction mechanisms, digital ID can become a gatekeeping tool. In Kenya and India, courts have emphasized that identities are supposed to facilitate access to rights, not block them. Yet governments – driven by cost-saving or anti-fraud rhetoric – frequently use these systems to purge beneficiaries.
Voices from the Ground
“I’m old, and I’m tired,” gasped Amri Devi, an 88-year-old widow from Jawaja block in Rajasthan. She had spent months pressing buttons and following procedures to get her own pension back – to no avail. Her anguish is echoed nationwide.
The district social worker in Rajasthan estimates that thousands of cases await correction. Government officials, when they acknowledge the problem, point to technical solutions – the use of Jan Aadhaar, or special ID cards for disabled people. But victims say that such fixes come too late, and too often still leave them in limbo.
Across villages, the common refrain is one of betrayal. A tribal labourer in Odisha complained that despite having had an Aadhaar for years, each biometric check is a new ordeal. A Bengali migrant in Kolkata who never had any identity documents says her family has been cut off from rice despite being Delhi’s lowest-paid factory workers.
In Rajasthan, families like that of Dhapu and Mena Rama have formed small support groups, helping each other to circulate applications, letters and affidavits. But even lawyers who file cases on their behalf say they are overwhelmed by the sheer numbers.
Legal experts warn that the digitalization drive has proceeded in “massive overreach.” Dr. Usha Ramanathan, a scholar, notes that Aadhaar law itself envisions voluntary updates every 5-10 years – an unrealistic burden for the frailm.thewire.in.
Human-rights lawyer Sunil Abraham has said government schemes have repeatedly ignored the Supreme Court’s basic directive: the rights of the needy must come first, not the data-collection goals of the state. In Rajya Sabha, Consumer Affairs Minister C.R. Chaudhary once assured that Aadhaar would bring transparency to the PDSpib.gov.in, but on the ground poor villagers see it as a tool of exclusion. Many NGOs now demand a rollback of Aadhaar mandates or at least strong alternative processes.
Conclusion: A Tragic Digital Welfare Divide
By now the evidence is clear and mounting: since 2016, tens of millions of India’s poorest have literally starved or gone without support due to Aadhaar-based exclusion. The combination of unyielding policy, faulty technology, and bureaucratic unwillingness to accommodate exceptions has shattered the social contract.
Children like Santoshi Kumari die still clutching their empty plates. Frail elders like Mena Rama sit in the shadows, cut off from their modest pensions. Families that held all the correct ration cards and identity proofs find themselves turned away at the doorstep.
This crisis is not a series of random glitches; it is a predictable consequence of a system that prioritized digital verification over human need. As Nikhil Dey of Rajasthan’s MKSS aptly summarizes: “We are seeing mass digital exclusion… and there is no way to seek compensation after they get falsely rejected”. In the name of “good governance,” the state has in effect declared millions to be nonexistent. The phrase “killing the poorest” is stark, but the cost is literal: lost nutrition, lost livelihoods, broken lives.
Indian policymakers now face a stark choice. They can act to fix the system – by reinstating manual fallbacks, ensuring Aadhaar is truly voluntary for welfare, and compensating those already harmed. Or they can double down, insisting technology is at fault, not the policies that enforce it.
Global experience shows that making digital ID unconditional only deepens inequalities. The poorest Indians, who already shoulder the nation’s hunger and disease burdens, cannot afford such errors. As we have documented here with data and testimony, Aadhaar-based exclusion is not an abstract risk – it is an ongoing tragedy.
Sources: Government press releases and actuarial data ; Supreme Court and legislative documents; investigative reports from The Wire, Indian Express, Scroll.in, Down To Earth, ThePrint, Al Jazeera, Moneylife, etc; interviews with affected families and NGOs (MKSS, Right to Food, ASEEM); and international analyses of digital ID exclusions. Each quotation and fact above is cited to its published source.
*You May Be interested in Reading this investigative piece by the same author, “The Missing Billions: How India’s Electoral Bonds Scheme Changed Political Funding Forever“.
*Learn More About The Author Here.
