The biometric identification system of Aadhaar has revolutionised how India manages identity verification and service delivery while the citizens have leapfrogged from no identity to digital identity in a short period, said Srikanth Nadhamuni, founder CTO of Aadhaar, here on Saturday.
Mr. Nadhamuni was delivering a special talk at Iluminate 3.0 organised by L & T Technical Services and the National Institute of Engineering.
The impact of Aadhaar is such that India’s evolving digital public infrastructure revolves around it and has now captured the attention of the world which wants to replicate its success, he said.
Mr. Nadhamuni said that 95.5% of India’s nearly 1.4 billion people have Aadhaar, and the coverage is 99% with respect to India’s adult population. Similarly, 92% have evinced satisfaction with Aadhaar and about 80% of the Aadhaar card holders have used it to avail government benefits, including pension, wages under MGNREGA, etc., said Mr. Nadhamuni.
Elaborating on its benefits, he said the system has helped plug leakage of 10 billion dollars annually from the social welfare projects. About financial exclusion that existed before the launch of Aadhaar, he pointed out that in 2008, only 17% of the country’s population had bank accounts.
It was speculated that it would take another 46 years if 80% of the population were to have bank accounts. But with Aadhaar and Aadhaar-based KYC norms, it took only six years to leapfrog to achieve that 80% coverage, he said. The resulting financial inclusion has given farmers, small-scale businessmen, etc. greater access to loans from banks.
He allayed fears of data being breached and said the Aadhaar numbers are random and do not store any details. The data is encrypted at source with 2048-bit encryption which cannot be breached, he added.
On the growing digital transactions in the country, Mr. Nadhamuni said there were 17 billion UPI transactions in January 2025, and the value was around 300 billion dollars. The value of Direct Benefit Transfer was to the tune of 467 billion dollars, he added.
Mr. Nadhamuni said one of the most remarkable aspects of Aadhaar was its use of open-source technology, and this approach has allowed other countries to explore the possibility of replicating a similar infrastructure.
Referring to the challenges during the development of Aadhaar, he said they had to build a system to register 1.5 million enrollments every day. Explaining the enormous amount of computation that goes behind Aadhaar identification, Mr. Nadamuni said each individual’s identification is matched with 1.4 billion people to rule out and weed out duplication. At its peak, about 1.5 million people were enrolling for Aadhaar which resulted in 13,000 trillion biometric matches being made on a daily basis, he added.
But the system has stood the test of time as it is simple and Mr. Nadamuni said for a country like India which requires scaling up on an enormous scale, the system has to be simple in design.
Gayatri Chauhan, founder and CEO of BuzzOnEarth, and a strong advocate of environmental action, sustainability, and leadership, spoke on innovation in the manufacturing process. She touched upon problems of plastic waste, deforestation, etc, and said it called for engineering solutions. In this context, Ms. Chauhan highlighted innovations in technology for material recovery and material transformation which, she said can help tackle plastic pollution and deforestation.
Abhishek Sinha of LTTS, M.S. Ranganath, president, NIE-Managing Committee, and students from NIE and other institutions were among those present.
Published - February 08, 2025 09:01 pm IST
