The Gaps Nobody Talks About: Exclusion, Privacy, and Biometric Failure

India Stack's successes are real and well-documented. The failures are documented too — they just get less attention in the enthusiastic narratives about UPI's Visa-beating transaction volumes.

## The Biometric Authentication Problem

Aadhaar's authentication works well for most people. For a significant minority, it doesn't.

Fingerprint authentication has documented failure rates of 6–12% among manual laborers, construction workers, and farmers — people whose fingerprints degrade due to physical work. A 2018 analysis estimated 2–5% of India's population could be excluded by biometric failures alone.

The elderly face degraded fingerprints. Children's biometrics are unstable. In 2023, UIDAI acknowledged over 54 hours of service downtime due to OTP delays and server issues.

The Rajasthan pension system offers a specific, current example. In 2023, the state mandated facial authentication for 600,000+ pensioners via the RAJSSP app. Data from January to April 2025:

- Facial authentication success rate: **69.11%** — nearly 1 in 3 pensioners fail
- Fingerprint authentication success rate: **76.27%**
- OTP success rate: 90%+ (but authorities deemed this "unreliable" despite the highest success rate)

The system was tested on only 15–20 people before statewide rollout to hundreds of thousands of elderly beneficiaries.

## Welfare Denial and Starvation Deaths

The consequences of biometric failure aren't just inconvenience when you're talking about food subsidies for people living in poverty.

Between 2013 and 2021, 43.9 million ration cards were deleted nationally. A 2020 J-PAL study found that 88% of cancelled ration cards in Jharkhand belonged to genuine beneficiaries, not fraudulent entries.

The Right to Food Campaign documented 57 starvation deaths across 9 Indian states from 2015 onwards, with at least 19 directly linked to Aadhaar-related denial of ration access. Human Rights Watch (2018) reported that 2.5 million families in Rajasthan were denied ration supplies from September 2016 to June 2017 due to Aadhaar issues.

In June 2024, an e-KYC mandate for ration cards in Odisha suspended rice distribution for over 2 million eligible individuals for non-compliance.

## The Digital Access Gap

India Stack is designed for people with smartphones and internet access. At the time of the COVID-19 vaccination rollout in 2021, an estimated 200–280 million Indians — roughly a third to 45% of the 18–44 age group — had no or poor internet access. 25% of India's population had no smartphone. CoWIN initially had no offline registration option. The Supreme Court in May 2021 noted the platform wasn't accessible to persons with disabilities.

Even as recently as 2023, about 70% of UPI users came from non-Tier-1 cities — which suggests significant rural penetration — but the makeup of *who isn't using UPI* is harder to see in the data. The lowest income, least connected, and least digitally literate populations are typically underrepresented in adoption statistics precisely because they aren't counted in digital usage data.

## The Centralization Problem

India Stack chose centralization. One database for biometrics. One payments protocol. This has real advantages — it's what made the scale achievable. But it also creates systemic risks.

A centralized biometric database is a surveillance infrastructure as much as it is a service infrastructure. The same system that routes welfare payments to the poor can also be used to identify and track individuals. The 2018 Supreme Court ruling limited mandatory Aadhaar use, but the infrastructure remains — and future governments will have different incentives than the ones that built it.

Privacy advocates argue that India Stack built in a privacy failure mode at the architectural level: you can't opt out of having your biometrics in a centralized government database if you want access to basic services. This is a design choice, not a technical necessity, and it's one that deserves serious scrutiny before other countries adopt similar models.

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The gaps don't erase the achievements. But they're essential context for the final question: what can other countries actually learn from India Stack?

The Gaps Nobody Talks About: Exclusion, Privacy, and Biometric Failure

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