India is pushing Aadhaar, the world’s largest digital identification system, deeper into on a regular basis personal life via a brand new app and offline verification help, a transfer that raises new questions on security, consent, and the broader use of the large database.
Introduced in late January by the Indian government-backed Distinctive Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), the adjustments introduce a brand new Aadhaar app alongside an offline verification framework that enables people to show their identification with out real-time checks in opposition to the central Aadhaar database.
The app permits customers to share a restricted quantity of data, equivalent to confirming that they’re over a sure age moderately than revealing their full date of beginning, with a spread of companies, like accommodations and housing societies to workplaces, platforms, and cost units, whereas the present mAadhaar app continues to function in parallel for now.
Alongside the brand new app, UIDAI can also be increasing Aadhaar’s footprint in cellular wallets, with upcoming integration with Google Pockets and discussions underway to allow comparable performance in Apple Pockets, along with current help on Samsung Pockets.
The Indian authority can also be selling the app’s use in policing and hospitality. The Ahmedabad Metropolis Crime Department has turn into the primary police unit in India to combine Aadhaar-based offline verification with PATHIK, a guest-monitoring platform launched by the police division, geared toward accommodations and visitor lodging to document guests’ data.
UIDAI has additionally positioned the brand new Aadhaar app as a digital visiting card for conferences and networking, permitting customers to share chosen private particulars by way of a QR code.
Officers on the launch in New Delhi mentioned these newest efforts are a part of a broader effort to exchange photocopies and guide ID checks with consent-based, offline verification. The strategy, they argued, is supposed to provide customers extra management over which particular identification data they wish to share, whereas enabling verification at scale with out having to question Aadhaar’s central database.
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June 23, 2026
Early uptake on high of large scale
Whereas UIDAI formally launched the brand new Aadhaar app final month, it had been in testing since earlier in 2025. Estimates from Appfigures present that the app, which appeared in app shops towards the tip of 2025, rapidly overtook the older mAadhaar app in month-to-month downloads.
Mixed month-to-month installs of Aadhaar-related apps rose from near 2 million in October to just about 9 million in December.
The brand new app is being layered onto an identification system that already operates at huge scale contemplating India’s inhabitants. Figures printed on UIDAI’s public dashboard present that Aadhaar has issued greater than 1.4 billion identification numbers and handles roughly 2.5 billion authentication transactions every month, alongside tens of billions of digital “know your buyer” checks since its launch.
The shift towards offline verification doesn’t exchange this infrastructure a lot as extending it, shifting Aadhaar from a largely backend verification software right into a extra seen and on a regular basis interface.
On the app’s launch, UIDAI officers mentioned the transfer towards offline verification was supposed to deal with long-standing dangers related to bodily photocopies and screenshots of Aadhaar paperwork, which have usually been collected, saved, and circulated with little oversight.
The enlargement comes at a time of regulatory adjustments, easing restrictions, and a brand new framework (PDF), with UIDAI now permitting some private and non-private organizations to confirm Aadhaar credentials with out querying the central database.
Consent, accountability, and unresolved dangers
Civil liberties and digital rights teams say these authorized adjustments don’t resolve Aadhaar’s deeper structural dangers.
Raman Jit Singh Chima, senior worldwide counsel and Asia Pacific coverage director at Entry Now, mentioned the enlargement of Aadhaar into offline and private-sector settings introduces new threats, notably at a time when India’s information safety framework remains to be being put in place.
Chima questioned the timing of the rollout, arguing that the federal authorities ought to have waited for India’s Data Safety Board to be established first, and permit for impartial evaluation and wider session with affected communities.
“The truth that this has gone forward at this level of time appears to point a desire to proceed the enlargement of using Aadhaar, even whether it is unclear by way of the additional dangers that it would pose to the system, in addition to to the info of Indians,” Chima instructed information.killnetswitch.
Indian authorized advocacy teams additionally level to unresolved implementation failures.
Prasanth Sugathan, authorized director at New Delhi-based digital rights group SFLC.in, mentioned that whereas UIDAI has framed the app as a software for citizen empowerment, it does little to deal with persistent issues, equivalent to inaccuracies within the Aadhaar database, security lapses, and poor mechanisms for redress, which have disproportionately have an effect on weak populations.
He additionally cited a 2022 report by India’s Comptroller and Auditor Normal, which discovered UIDAI had failed to satisfy sure compliance requirements.
“Such points can usually end in disenfranchisement of individuals, particularly those that had been meant to be benefited by such programs,” Sugathan instructed information.killnetswitch, including that it stays unclear how information shared via the brand new app would stop breaches or leaks.
Campaigners related to Rethink Aadhaar, a civil society marketing campaign centered on Aadhaar-related rights and accountability, argue that the offline verification system dangers reintroducing private-sector use of Aadhaar in methods the Supreme Courtroom has already explicitly barred.
Shruti Narayan and John Simte of the group mentioned enabling personal entities to routinely depend on Aadhaar for verification quantities to “Aadhaar creep”, normalizing its use throughout social and financial life regardless of a 2018 judgment that struck down provisions permitting personal actors to make use of Aadhaar to confirm individuals’s data. They warned that consent in such contexts is usually illusory, notably in conditions involving accommodations, housing societies, or supply employees, whereas India’s information safety legislation stays largely untested.
Collectively, the brand new app, regulatory adjustments, and increasing ecosystem are shifting Aadhaar from a background identification utility into a visual layer of every day life that’s more and more laborious to keep away from. As India doubles down on Aadhaar, governments and tech firms are watching intently, attracted by the promise of population-scale identification checks.
The Indian IT ministry and UIDAI CEO didn’t reply to requests for feedback.
