Slight spelling anomalies and mismatched fingerprints keep a child out of school or a family
from their ration entitlements.
The anger gives way to tears.
Guddi Kumari comes out of the starkly-built Aadhaar centre at New Delhi's Inderlok in rage, but the marginalised can't afford that emotion for long. Guddi breaks down. Her daughter's Aadhaar has just been "cancelled".
On a sheaf of papers she holds, an official has penned: "Aadhaar Cancelled." And then in Hindi script: "Supreme Court Metro Station, Gate No 2, Aadhaar Seva Kendra."
This is where Guddi Kumari is expected to go next. It is at the other end of the city. Guddi's husband works as "labour" - he loads and unloads a thela (cart) with heavy goods.
At the Inderlok Aadhaar centre, the day's heat rises. So does people's frustration with a system that treats them with a callousness they have done nothing to deserve.
Their only fault is being born in a country with many languages which decided to impose a unique identity, attached to biometrics, now mandatory for basically everything. This ID card is depriving them of their most basic rights: the right to education, the right to food.
Chintu Sah and Guddi Kumari feel they are failing as parents because of the Aadhaar problem.
"How will she go to school? I am getting private tuition for her because she is not going to school," says Guddi, addressing whoever cares to listen in a sweating and serpentine queue.
Some do, but others are trying to cope with the sun and keeping track of a guard who is distributing tokens. They say the line starts forming at 6 am.
The identity issue is too complicated for the Sah family to handle. They have visited a cybercafe and taken printouts for the Aadhaar centre, spending hard-earned money. The mother feels the daughter, Rajnandini, a girl with a bouncy ponytail, who stands subdued as she sees her parent in tears, may lose out on the entire school academic session.
The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) hits the underprivileged the most. It drives them to despair, this search for their own identity, based on paperwork or kagaz.
The kagaz can go wrong with the slightest spelling mistake - a lady in queue at the Inderlok Aadhaar centre is there to correct a half s in Hindi to a full s - or with fingerprints not matching as children grow up or adults grow old.
Out there is an apathetic system that is hell-bent on pushing the Aadhaar for every service, even school enrolment.
I spot nearly 50 children in the Inderlok Aadhaar centre queue, several of them younger than five years of age. A child licks a cream biscuit while sitting on the burning concrete steps of the centre. A mother complains that her two children have not drunk water for several hours.
It is now close to noon and the temperature is 37 degrees. People stand in the open. A couple hold their two-and-a-half-year old, they want to get his Aadhaar made before he is eligible for school enrolment.
The guard announces that those with small children can make a separate queue but there is too much chaos now. An official appears with a megaphone to allow a pregnant woman to enter the building.
There is scattered media coverage of children not being able to go to school because of lack of Aadhaar - but nowhere close to sounding the alarm bells on how the goal of universal enrolment being perused in lofty official documents lies by the wayside.
'One of the primary goals of the schooling system must be to ensure that children are enrolled in and are attending school.
Through initiatives such as the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (now the Samagra Shiksha) and the Right to Education Act, India has made remarkable strides in recent years in attaining near-universal enrolment in elementary education,' notes The New Education Policy or NEP 2020, before expressing concern about pushout rates of higher classes.
'A concerted national effort will be made to ensure universal access and afford opportunity to all children of the country to obtain quality holistic education - including vocational education - from pre-school to Grade 12.'
Teachers and principals voice concern about ground reality. Hindi daily Dainik Bhaskar reported on April 22 that a parents' forum in Haryana has said that children whose parents do not have a 'permanent address' have complained that they are being denied an Aadhaar card and, consequently, school enrolment. This is against the Right to Education, said the parents' forum.
The Hindu newspaper said in February that several teachers in Hyderabad reported that school heads were denying admission to students who did not possess Aadhaar. A teacher said of the 32 students who applied for admission in Class 1, only ten had the unique identity card.
"The remaining 22 had no Aadhaar. All these children come from poor and daily-wage families and sending them away means they will become child labourers. So, for the time being, I just entered the last four digits as 9999 or a combination and took them," the teacher said.
Last year, Hindustan Times reported on directives that led to Aadhaar becoming mandatory for school students: registration of students on UDISE+, a central data-gathering portal of India's school education system.
The newspaper pointed out that children in villages often lack birth certificates, and this makes Aadhaar difficult to obtain. In 2021, the Narendra Modi regime mandated a birth certificate for Aadhaar. Principals told the newspaper that before this diktat, school principals signed birth certificates for their students who lacked them. And those were accepted.
This points to cascading paperwork required to get a child into school: a bona fide birth certificate, then a matching Aadhaar with correct spelling and fingerprints.
Add to this, opening a bank account for the child and linking the bank account to Aadhaar so that children can get direct cash transfer for books and uniform - to an unlettered parent with small earnings, every step is costly and can end in frustration and failure.
Of the over 80 crore ration cards in existence in December 2024, more than 5 crore were weeded out due to digitisation, Aadhaar-seeding or de-duplication between 2013 and December 2024.
Manju Yadav at the Inderlok Aadhaar centre is there to have her son's bank account linked to his Aadhaar. The boy is bright and becomes my assistant, holding my notepad while I shoot video.
He, along with Rajnandini Kumari, help me translate a phone number given to me in Hindi, to English - my Hindi count leaves a lot to be desired. This is the talent India is keeping out of school.
As the queue forms and re-forms, the security guard is repeatedly hectored.
Shalu, a single mother and factory worker who is losing her day's earning to get her child's fingerprint to match with the Aadhaar card, realises the futility of the exercise and breaks out into a tirade: "Public ekathi ho jaye tou inki tou aisi ki taisi mar jayegi. Par public ch*** hai (If the people in the queue get together, we can take on the officials. But the public is an ass)."
Shalu is worried not only about school but also about ration. If the fingerprint does not match, the child's name will be struck off the ration card. Which means the single mother will lose the right to free food for her children.
Which brings us to the rest of the queue at Inderlok.
To e-KYC.
An old woman who wants help with the e-KYC of her ration card approaches me. Her husband, with his weather-beaten face, has been standing by, almost at my elbow, soaking in my conversations with other people.
Once his wife speaks up, Chatur Singh brings out a polythene bag tucked away in his pocket. It contains his identity. Singh, born two years after India gained independence, did not know he would one day stand in queue, trying to bear the April heat, and attempting to prove he is alive and entitled to the ration that is his right.
The couple, Chatur Singh, 76, and Shanti, 70, are here to do e-KYC of their ration card, which is as complicated as it sounds. It involves using their biometrics, and authenticating they are genuine recipients of ration or food. It further involves getting an OTP on their mobile.
The e-KYC of ration cards is supposed to weed out cheaters. But what it is doing is helping the state cut down on the poor's right to a minimum amount of free food. A rumour goes down the line that the Union government will eventually cancel all ration cards and stop giving ration.
The disaster of e-KYC has been protested to no avail. The Right to Food campaign, in August last year, demanded that the government immediately stop the e-KYC on ration cards.
It reported the "immense distress and problems" being faced by people across the country on account of the e-KYC verification of all 810 million people who have ration cards and are entitled to receive foodgrains under the National Food Security Act.
The campaign reported people rushing back to their villages because they are being informed that failure to get e-KYC of the whole family will result in the stoppage of ration.
Odisha's e-KYC chaos is a food security crisis in the waiting, wrote Sumeet Panda, associated with the Odisha Khadya Adhikar Abhijan, in April. In Odisha alone, 5,22,000 people have been deprived of their right to food.
Journalist Rahul Bhatia says the biometric identity Aadhaar took shape as a Hindutva instrument of surveillance, but was pushed with the carrot of welfare to make it palatable in a big, complex country.
Big numbers, unverified, were dangled to show how much the smart identity card would save the country - in terms of stemming leakages in welfare schemes. No one checked to see if those numbers were correct, or where they came from.
"The discourse then becomes how technology will have this net benefit. Meanwhile, we are not looking at whether it has been audited, who is designing it, where the data flow is. These are important discussions in a country that is going digital in a huge way," says Bhatia, author of The Identity Project: The Unmaking of a Democracy, a book released last year.
"Technology, especially projects this large, should not be administered behind closed doors, these are too important for people to keep a secret. This is not how decisions which will end up changing the relationship between citizen and state should be made," Bhatia adds.
The welfare carrot Bhatia talks about is still being dangled. Aadhaar is still touted as a means of stemming welfare leakage and target the right beneficiaries, when all it is doing is the opposite: keeping people from accessing their rights.
The Times of India reported in April that the country's first Aadhaar recipient was not getting the promised payment of a government welfare scheme in her bank account. Ranjana Sonawane, 54, is eligible, but does not get the monthly payment from a welfare scheme of the Maharashtra government in her bank account.
The money from the scheme is paid directly to the Aadhaar-linked bank accounts of beneficiaries. Ranjana Sonawane's Aadhaar is linked to a bank account which is not hers. So she is not able to access the money.
"It is linked to someone else's account in a private bank. When I go to check, officials show me papers claiming my money has been sent, but I never receive it," Sonawane told The Times of India.
Countless people in Jharkhand are unable to withdraw money from their bank accounts because the accounts have been frozen until they complete KYC, found surveys in Latehar and Lohardaga district by local NREGA Sahayata Kendras, said economist and activist Jean Drèze in a press statement in October last year.
The victims of this mass freezing of accounts are pensioners who depend on their meagre pensions, children who receive scholarships, and women entitled to Rs 1,000 per month under Jharkhand's new Maiya Samman Yojana.
KYC formalities are not easy for poor people. They require biometric verification of your Aadhaar number at a Pragya Kendra, taking the verification certificate to the bank, filling a form there, and submitting both with the requisite documents. After that, the customer is at the mercy of the bank for timely reactivation of the account. This can take months, said Drèze.
Overcrowding in rural banks make things worse. In both survey areas, there were long queues at the local banks. The crowds consisted largely of people trying to complete KYC, or women looking for their 'Maiya Samman Yojana' money.
One local bank manager said he had a backlog of 1,500 KYC applications, against a processing capacity of just 30 KYCs per day.
"The slightest discrepancy between a person's Aadhaar card and bank passbook can easily lead to the rejection of a KYC application," wrote Drèze in February in The Economic Times.
"The price of this blame game (between banks and the RBI) is paid by poor people who find themselves locked out of their bank account when KYC is due, without as much as a prior notice in many cases. From then on, hurdles abound - finding out what they're supposed to do, queuing for hours at the bank, paying bribes to middlemen, filling daunting forms, signing obscure consent documents, submitting identity proofs, correcting Aadhaar cards, undergoing biometric authentication...."
A legal challenge to Aadhaar in the Supreme Court came to nought; the ID has grown more powerful on the ground, becoming the doorkeeper to admissions to schools and the open university, certificates and welfare programmes.
When Kamal Paarcha, an Ambedkarite, needed a Scheduled Caste certificate for his daughter's admission, he produced his own caste certificate. This was rejected because it was not seeded with his Aadhaar.
Paarcha, who is aware of his rights and has read Ambedkar, protested. An official took him aside and advised: "Satta se panga matt lo (Don't mess with the state)".
Paarcha lost two days' pay in this running around - his daughter's enrolment was ensured by registering for her caste certificate based on her sibling's caste certificate, which was Aadhaar-seeded.
Paarcha is yet to get his daughter's caste certificate despite the registration.
The state taketh, but not giveth.
Journalist Bhatia, who traces the birth of Aadhaar, and how it was pushed by technocrat Nandan Nilekani as voluntary, writes in The Identity Project:
"But among people who lived in details, who noticed the fine print of governance, a pithy phrase began to circulate. 'Voluntary mandatory' described a choice that wasn't one; the people standing in line were under duress."
Bhatia quotes Usha Ramanathan, a legal researcher and strong Aadhaar critic, who is "convinced Nilekani knew nothing about the poor":
"You can't just carry on with a project like this. And you put the poor into something like this? They don't even know what's happening to them."
Ramanathan bristled at the UIDAI project creators audacity: "They started it without telling us anything about it. And when they started telling us about it, they told us what we needed to do. They didn't tell us what it was, and what it would do to us."
Watch the video report here
Aparna Kalra is a Delhi School of Economics alumnus whose forte is investigations, profiles and data journalism. She has reported for Reuters, Mint, and worked as a fact-checker on a Facebook project for AFP.
Edited by Jahnavi Sen
Illustrations by Pariplab Chakraborty
Data visualisation by Elisha Vermani
Produced by Elisha Vermani
Developed in collaboration with Ekaansh Arora