Aadhaar is a biometrically enabled digital ID system (serving as a proof of identity and address) developed in India and managed by the country’s Unique Identification Authority. 1.2 billion people currently have Aadhaar, over 90% of residents nationwide. The system was developed as of 2009, with a primary objective of streamlining access to services and ensuring cost-effectiveness in service delivery.
The country’s social assistance system was one of the first to adopt Aadhaar ‘seeding’ to support the distribution of benefits, with the objective of combatting leakage and fraud while reducing costs by enabling direct distribution of assistance to beneficiary bank accounts (with potential benefits in terms of financial inclusion).
In practice, ‘seeding’ consists of linking beneficiary accounts to their Aadhaar ID, to be used for authentication purposes. In other words, recipients have to ‘prove’ their identity when accessing benefits. Official reports and early evaluations document significant savings from this process, for example in terms of deduplication of benefits and removal of ‘ghost’ beneficiaries. A nationwide survey of 147,000 households in 28 States (the State of Aadhaar 2019) also stresses user perceptions of these changes: high percentages of respondents felt the new system made social assistance more reliable (80%), easier to access (85%), and prevented others from accessing their benefits (61%). Overall, 92% of people were very satisfied or somewhat satisfied with Aadhaar.
Of course, linking social protection to a biometric ID system such as Aadhaar is not without challenges and risks. First of all, even in a system with 90% coverage, it is important to consider who is being left out. Lack of Aadhaar (8%) is more prevalent among marginalised groups and children, with important impacts on exclusion from social assistance. Second of all, even for those who are covered by Aadhaar, implementation challenges have sometimes generated further exclusion, for example due to biometric authentication failure. Third, control of biometric data by Government poses important risks in terms of data security and privacy. Fully addressing these challenges – further documented by the academic literature on the linkage between Aadhaar and social assistance services – is a fundamental priority to ensure Aadhaar seeding sustains the implementation of India’s Social Protection Floor, rather than hampering inclusion.
To see how this example facilitated national social protection responses to the COVID pandemic, please click here
Further reading links
- State of Aadhaar 2019 https://www.stateofaadhaar.in/assets/download/SoA_2019_Report_web.pdf?utm_source=download_report&utm_medium=button_dr_2019
- Barca (2017) Integrating data and information management for social protection: social registries and integrated beneficiary registries –Available here: https://dfat.gov.au/about-us/publications/Pages/integrating-data-information-management-social-protection.aspx
- Khera (2011) The UID Project and Welfare Schemes http://re.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/files/UID%20Project.pdf