New Delhi, In a nation already burdened by economic inequality and administrative inefficiency, the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government has mastered the art of compounding public misery through a relentless obsession with identity documentation. What began as a purported drive for efficiency and transparency has devolved into a chaotic web of mandatory cards, flip-flopping policies, and outright exclusion, leaving millions of Indians—particularly the poor and marginalised—trapped in a cycle of red tape and denial of basic services. The recent decrees from Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra, both BJP-ruled states, barring the use of Aadhaar as proof of date of birth, exemplify this governance fiasco: a system that forces citizens to chase ever-shifting requirements, only to render them obsolete at whim.
Consider the trajectory of Aadhaar, the biometric identity card that the Modi administration aggressively expanded after assuming power in 2014. Inherited from the previous United Progressive Alliance government, Aadhaar was transformed under Modi into an omnipresent gatekeeper for everyday life. School admissions were denied to children without it; passports and driving licences became contingent on its linkage; hospital admissions in public facilities often required its presentation; and access to state-funded welfare schemes—such as subsidised rations under the Public Distribution System or scholarships for underprivileged students—was outright barred for those lacking the card. In 2017, the government mandated Aadhaar linkage for mobile phone connections, affecting over a billion users and sparking widespread privacy concerns that culminated in a Supreme Court rebuke limiting its mandatory use. Yet, the push continued, with the 2016 Aadhaar Act enabling its integration into banking, taxation, and even private-sector services like job applications at multinational firms. For the rural poor, this meant arduous trips to enrolment centres, often in remote areas, facing biometric failures due to worn fingerprints from manual labour, and enduring weeks of exclusion from essential benefits like the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) wages.
Now, fast-forward to 2025: Uttar Pradesh’s Planning Department, under Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath—a Modi ally—has issued a notification declaring Aadhaar invalid as proof of date of birth, citing the absence of an attached birth certificate. Maharashtra’s Revenue Department has gone further, cancelling all post-2023 birth certificates issued solely on Aadhaar’s basis and ordering probes into issuing officers. This reversal is not isolated; it follows the Election Commission of India’s (ECI) recent clarifications to the Supreme Court that Aadhaar serves only as proof of identity, not citizenship or residence, during electoral roll revisions in states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. The ECI’s stance came after the apex court’s September 2025 order emphasising these limitations, effectively curtailing Aadhaar’s role in voter registration—a process that could disenfranchise vulnerable groups amid the ongoing Special Intensive Revision ahead of the 2026 qualifying date. What message does this send? That a document once hailed as the “foundation” of India’s digital economy is now deemed insufficient even by the very institutions that enforced its ubiquity.
This is no mere policy adjustment; it is symptomatic of a broader pattern under Modi: the proliferation of specialised identity cards that promise universality but deliver fragmentation. Since 2014, the government has introduced or expanded a litany of schemes requiring new documentation, each adding layers of bureaucracy without interoperability. Take the e-Shram card, launched in 2021 for unorganised workers—over 290 million have enrolled, yet it is not accepted as a standalone proof for banking loans or even inter-state migration benefits in BJP-ruled states like Gujarat, where local domicile proofs are demanded instead. The Ayushman Bharat Health Account (ABHA) card, part of the 2018 national health protection scheme, requires separate registration and is rejected for non-health-related services like school fee waivers, forcing families to juggle multiple IDs. Then there’s the proposed Family ID, floated in 2021 to streamline welfare distribution, which remains mired in pilots and offers no relief from Aadhaar’s deficiencies. Even the National Common Mobility Card, introduced in 2019 for seamless public transport, is limited to select cities and incompatible with rural bus services, rendering it useless for the majority.
The human cost is staggering. In Uttar Pradesh, a farmer in Lucknow district without a formal birth certificate—common among those born in villages pre-1990s—might have relied on Aadhaar for a driving licence in 2020, only to find it invalid for renewing the same in 2025, necessitating costly affidavits and notary fees that eat into meagre incomes. A migrant worker from Bihar, enrolled under e-Shram for job guarantees, arrives in Maharashtra to discover the card holds no weight for local hospital admission, compelling them to procure yet another state-specific ID amid the ongoing crackdown on “suspicious” certificates. Women in low-income households, often without independent documentation, face compounded barriers: barred from LPG subsidies under the Ujjwala scheme without Aadhaar linkage, then denied child education grants when the card fails as age proof. These are not hypotheticals; reports from civil society groups like the Right to Food Campaign document thousands of deaths linked to Aadhaar-related exclusions from rations between 2017 and 2022 alone. In a country where 21% of the population lives below the poverty line, this bureaucratic churn exacerbates inequality, disproportionately affecting Dalits, Adivasis, and religious minorities who lack economic clout to navigate the system.
The irony is profound: a government that prides itself on “minimum government, maximum governance” has instead maximised paperwork while minimising accessibility. Rather than this endless card-chasing, India needs a simplified, inclusive framework. Promote universally accessible proofs like electricity or gas bills, water connection statements, or bank passbooks—these are obtainable regardless of caste, religion, or wealth, often at nominal cost, and already serve as de facto identifiers in many contexts. For comprehensive needs—proof of date of birth, residency, domicile, school admissions, hospital access, or welfare schemes—a standardised 10th-class certificate, issued free through public education systems, could suffice. Such reforms would eliminate the need for biometric invasions of privacy and reduce administrative waste, estimated at billions of rupees annually in enrolment drives.
The Modi regime’s identity policies are not innovation; they are institutionalised harassment, eroding trust in governance and fuelling social discord. Until the BJP prioritises people over paperwork, India’s citizens will continue to pay the price for this self-inflicted quagmire.
