Consider a 60-year-old farm labourer in a village in eastern Uttar Pradesh, born at home in the 1960s, who has voted in every election of his life. During the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls, an official asks him to prove his date of birth, his residence and his citizenship. He has no birth certificate, because no one registered his birth. His ration card, he is told, is not proof of residence. His Aadhaar — posted years ago to his very door — proves neither his age, address, nor his citizenship. He never held a passport and never finished school. He stands before the state with empty hands, and the burden is on him to prove that he is not a foreigner.
It is the predictable result of three failures of the state, each of its own making. None of this is the failing of any one government or party. It is the cumulative result of decades of collective neglect — of unglamorous, unfashionable tasks such as registering every birth, which never commanded political attention — for which the system as a whole, across successive governments, bears responsibility.
The Registration of Births and Deaths Act has required, since 1969, that every birth be registered within 21 days; running that system was the state’s job, and for decades it did not. Among children under five, only 41 per cent of births were registered as recently as 2005-06, and before the mid-2000s most Indians were born at home — institutional deliveries were under 39 per cent nationally. The reassuring figure that 98 per cent of births are now registered describes today’s newborns; it says nothing about the adults already on the rolls.
Registration is also not a certificate in hand — these are two separate acts in law, and for decades, the second often did not happen. If the strictest view is right, that only a birth certificate issued at the time of birth is genuine proof of date of birth, then perhaps one voter in eight holds one; some 85 crore do not. A test that the overwhelming majority of citizens cannot pass is not a test of eligibility. It is a machine for exclusion.
I can speak about this from experience. In Aadhaar’s early years, which I led as UIDAI’s founding director general, we found that a great many residents simply did not know their date of birth. We recorded it as verified where a document existed, and as declared or approximate where none did; in the villages, the majority fell in the latter categories. People would fix their age by an event — the year the great draught happened. It is why so many Indians carry January 1 as their birthday: the date the system assigns when only a year is known. To demand a precise, documented date of birth from such people is not rigour; it is exclusion.
We also never gave him a citizenship document. There is no citizenship card in India. The passport — held by under 8 per cent of Indians — was clarified this June by the Ministry of External Affairs to be only a travel document, not a proof of citizenship. Aadhaar, by its own statute, is not citizenship, nor are the voter ID or PAN. This is not an oversight: Every attempt to build a citizens’ register has failed — the MNIC pilot abandoned, the Assam NRC excluded 19 lakh people and resolved nothing, the idea finally diluted into the National Population Register, a register of residents and not citizens, because the Home Ministry found a field test of citizenship impractical. The citizen is asked to prove a status the state has never certified.
And we now disown our own documents. A petition pending in the Supreme Court asks that Aadhaar be treated only as proof of identity — not of age, address or citizenship. On residence the law itself makes the point: A voter must be ordinarily resident, and the Representation of the People Act says that owning a house does not establish it and that temporary absence does not end it. Every document in circulation is partial or disowned — the ration card the government itself says is not residence proof, the utility bill in another’s name, the rent agreement easily faked. Aadhaar alone was physically delivered to the holder’s door, through Speed Post with acknowledgement due — a deliberate and costly choice that shows the letter was meant to evidence residence — and that is exactly the document the state now says is not proof of address. We disown the one address to which we took the trouble to deliver a letter.
Add the three failures together and the citizen is defenceless: The state recognises neither his age, nor his residence, nor his citizenship, and the Foreigners Act still puts the burden on him to prove he is not a foreigner. Any official can brand almost any citizen a suspected illegal immigrant, certain that he cannot produce papers the state never let him have. There is a name for rejecting every record — including those the state itself created — and so being unable to recognise one’s own people: It is nihilism, and it is no way to govern. It is unjust to make the citizen answer for a failure that was the system’s, not his own. This is exactly the injustice the Election Commission’s SIR now inflicts on crores of ordinary voters — an old, document-heavy, house-to-house method revived, in the digital India age, to solve a problem the country has already solved.
The answer is not more purism, but pragmatism. Aadhaar is among the most successful public projects this country has built — a unique digital identity for every resident, which transformed welfare delivery and accelerated digitisation. The honest question is not Aadhaar versus a perfect document, but Aadhaar versus what people actually hold. On age, we need only one binary fact — is the person 18 or older? Aadhaar answers it without the date at all. Since a child’s biometrics are not captured below the age of five, anyone whose biometrics were taken around 2013 or earlier was at least five then and is 18 now. On residence, ask which document is stronger than the address Aadhaar posted to the door, and how many hold that stronger document. On citizenship, let Aadhaar establish identity, analytics flag the few genuine outliers, and the Home Ministry decide them, as the Supreme Court has held.
India has spent a decade building digital public infrastructure the world now studies. It would be perverse to declare, at the end of it, that none of it can be trusted — and to send officials door to door demanding old papers we never gave, from people the state itself never documented. A republic that takes its duties seriously does not make its people prove, again and again, that they belong to it. It recognises them. We already have the means. We should use them.
The writer was founding DG and mission director of UIDAI. Views are personal
A republic that takes its duties seriously does not make its people prove, again and again, that they belong to it. (Illustration: C R Sasikumar) 
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