This article was supported by the Pulitzer Center’s AI Accountability Network. 

Rajsamand (Rajasthan): Ghisi Devi, of Vijaypura village in Rajsamand district’s Deogarh panchayat, turned 70 years old in 2006, says her voter ID card. That would make her just short of 90 years old today. A paper card bearing the details of her Aadhaar – her biometrics-linked ID number – however, records her as 92 years old. It states she was born on January 1,1933, over a decade before India became independent from British colonial rule.

On a crisp November noon, Devi, who worked on a farm all her life but has been bedridden for the last year, tried to sit up on her cot covered with blankets. A local community activist was trying to carry out her facial authentication on a mobile device. Her room was bare, with a chakki or millstone to grind flour by hand in a corner, and a handful of metal pots and plastic cans on bare shelves. It was dark inside, though the noon sun shone bright outside.

Nikesh Kumar, the activist, asked Devi in Marwari to blink her eyes at the screen of the mobile phone he held up in his hands. But she is hard of hearing, and could not follow what he said. She looked warily towards the phone camera. The screen showed her face encircled with a green line that would turn red every few seconds, implying a failed attempt. This went on for several minutes. The activists and her family members gathered around her repeated – louder each time – that she must blink to get her pensions. Devi got increasingly irritated and finally, gestured that everyone should leave the room.

Though economically poor women such as Devi need to only be over 55 years old to qualify for an old age pension of Rs 1,500 a month, in 2016-17, the Rajasthan government made it mandatory for pensioners to authenticate their identity by enrolling in the biometrics database and authenticating their Aadhaar details. Earlier, the postman would bring a money order and deliver the pension in cash at pensioners’ homes, and pensioners’ thumbprints on paper would count as annual verification. Now, they continue to qualify for their pension for the next year only after they have digitally marked themselves as alive.

For Devi, whose fingers are too bent with old age for fingerprint authentication, and who cannot receive a one-time password as she has no mobile phone linked to her Aadhaar, the government has offered facial authentication. But it was not working that day.

Finally, Devi’s grandson Pooran, who works as a helper on a local construction site, lifted her feeble body on his shoulder and carried her outside. He placed her on the ground, crouched against a wall, and then activist Nikesh Kumar tried to authenticate her face one more time. Finally, in the bright sun in the courtyard, her face matched the data stored on government servers, and there was palpable relief. “Devi has been marked alive online for the next 12 months, but what after that?” Shubham Biswas, one of the young activists, was worried.

Nikesh Kumar, a community activist with MKSS, tried to carry out facial authentication for Ghisi Devi at her home but it failed several times. Photo: Anumeha Yadav

Since 2009, the Indian government has collected personal data – fingerprints, iris scans, photographs – of 1.4 billion residents in its digital identification project “Aadhaar”(meaning, foundation), which is the world’s largest digital ID programme. Senior bureaucrats presented it as voluntary to enroll in, arguing the programme would offer millions of poor who lacked identification a valid ID, and prevent corruption by ensuring social benefits reach the right people. The government has made access to over 300 schemes and public benefits – food subsidies, pensions, maternity benefits – conditional on enrolling in the programme. To access social benefits, citizens must verify their fingerprints against the biometric data stored under their unique ID in a central database, by scanning fingers, or most recently, by providing their facial scans.

Since its G20 presidency in 2023, the government has positioned itself as an exporter of digital governance solutions which it terms “digital public infrastructure” (DPI). A digital ID such as Aadhaar is being considered a “core DPI”. India has entered into an agreement with neighbouring Asian countries such as Sri Lanka and even the military junta-led government in Myanmar to export e-governance software products based on Aadhaar.

India is now set to host the AI Impact Summit, a global meet of governments and other bodies to discuss safety and governance of artificial intelligence (AI). The government has highlighted Aadhaar as a prominent example of deploying AI successfully in public schemes in events leading up to the summit to be held in February 2026. At one such event on December 5 in New Delhi, a senior bureaucrat in the Union cabinet secretariat, Saurabh K. Tiwari, who is additional secretary Direct Benefit Transfer Mission, asserted that the Indian government uses AI tools such as machine learning in Aadhaar to “prevent duplication, detect spoofing and strengthen biometric verification”. He said that in social benefits transfers, “nearly 99 percent of applications now use biometric authentication, and most of these rely on face authentication”. Since 2023, Aadhaar facial authentication transactions have grown at more than 50 million transactions a month, and are

© The Wire