India adopts and expands citizen biometric registration system

The national government concluded that many Indian states had made significant headway with enrolling residents in the Aadhaar system. As a result, Modi decided Aadhaar should in fact continue and not be merged with India’s census database. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) adopted a position to make the biometric registration scheme ubiquitous across myriad government programs.

The Aadhaar program, governed by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), is currently used to authenticate delivery of social services including school attendance, natural gas subsidies to India’s rural poor, and direct wage payments to bank accounts. The system also provides identification to people who do not have birth certificates. After an extensive review, the new government decided to extend the use of the system to other social programs and to make Aadhaar the country’s primary national identity scheme.

As a result, the new government now wants to widen the use of the program to include mandatory biometric attendance for government officials and even prisoner identification. The new government is also reportedly exploring the use of Aadhaar to assist in the issuance of passports, mobile SIM smartphone cards, and pension payments. Furthermore, the Indian government also plans to use the Aadhaar database to deploy its newly proposed universal healthcare program. Under government guidance, Aadhaar will be used as a means of identification for healthcare insurance beneficiaries.