The facts

The multiple facts of Aadhaar

In 2016 this page listed what Aadhaar had saved India. Australian Treasury papers and a European thesis then quoted it. Here are those numbers again, what they actually said, and what courts and auditors found afterwards.

First published 8 August 2016 · Rewritten and fact-checked 13 October 2026 · Aadhaar News desk

In September 2017, FinTech Australia, an industry body for more than 170 Australian fintech startups, investors and accelerators, sent a submission to the Australian Treasury's Review into Open Banking in Australia. In a section on how other countries handle financial data, it described India's Aadhaar system. The scheme, it said, "is estimated to have created over US$400m in cost efficiencies for the government in benefits distribution". Footnote 6 pointed to this page.¹

That same year a master's thesis at Tallinn University of Technology, on Ukraine's electronic ID, cited this page for two figures: "more than $400 million" saved in two years, and 16 million fake identities deleted, saving "$150 million".²

Both figures are a tenth of what this page actually reported.

What the 2016 page said

The original article, "The multiple facts of Aadhaar", appeared here on 8 August 2016. It argued that tying welfare payments to Aadhaar would change how India delivers subsidies. It quoted these figures, all government estimates or press reports of them:³

• The government estimated it had saved over Rs 27,000 crore in two years by paying beneficiaries of welfare schemes directly.
• 1.6 crore (16 million) bogus ration cards had been deleted, saving about Rs 10,000 crore.
• 3.5 crore duplicate beneficiaries had been removed from PAHAL, the cooking-gas subsidy, saving over Rs 14,000 crore in 2014-15 alone.
• The rural jobs scheme, MGNREGS, had saved Rs 3,000 crore, "roughly 10 per cent" of its annual budget.
• A World Bank study was quoted as saying the cooking-gas cash transfer saved "about one billion dollar per year" nationwide.
• UIDAI generated the 100th crore (one billionth) Aadhaar on 4 April 2016, and the Lok Sabha passed the Aadhaar Act on 11 March 2016.

The page also made claims nobody should repeat as fact: that Aadhaar was "one of the most secured data repository" systems in the world, and that it could not be "fudged, altered or manipulated". The audit and court record below tests both.

The missing zero

Indian figures are counted in lakhs and crores. One crore is 10 million. Rs 27,000 crore is therefore Rs 270 billion. At about Rs 67 to the US dollar, the 2016 average, that is roughly US$4 billion, not US$400 million.

Both quotes are out by exactly a factor of ten, the size of slip a crore-to-million conversion invites. Neither document shows its working, so the cause cannot be confirmed. The direction of the error matters less than the lesson: an Indian government estimate reached an Australian policy review as a number ten times smaller than the one stated.

What the auditors found

The bigger problem is with the estimates themselves. India's Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) audited PAHAL, the cooking-gas scheme behind the largest savings claim. It found that in 2015-16 the subsidy bill fell by Rs 21,552.28 crore because global crude prices had dropped, lowering the subsidy per cylinder. Lower cylinder sales, the effect closest to cutting out duplicates, accounted for Rs 1,763.93 crore.⁴ On the CAG's numbers, about 92 per cent of the fall came from oil prices, not from Aadhaar.

The petroleum ministry defended its figures, saying subsidy went only to consumers cleared after de-duplication. Its own breakdown counted 3.34 crore connections as "duplicate or inactive".⁴ Inactive is not the same as fake. A cancelled connection may belong to a family that moved, died, or simply stopped buying gas.

In April 2022 the CAG published a performance audit of UIDAI itself, covering 2014-15 to 2018-19.⁵ It found:

• Aadhaar is meant only for residents who lived in India for 182 days in the year before applying, but UIDAI checked this with a "casual self-declaration". The CAG had no assurance that every holder met the legal definition of resident.
• By November 2019 UIDAI had cancelled more than 4.75 lakh Aadhaar numbers as duplicates, and accepted poor-quality biometrics that let one person hold more than one number.
• Poor biometrics cause failed authentications. UIDAI put the burden of fixing them on residents and charged for the update: in 2018-19 more than 73 per cent of 3.04 crore biometric updates were paid, voluntary updates for defective biometrics.
• UIDAI gave free authentication to banks, telecom companies and other agencies until March 2019, contrary to its own regulations.

A system that issues duplicates cannot be "impossible to fudge". The auditor's word for UIDAI's checks is the useful one.

What happened after 2016

1. 26 March 2016. The Aadhaar Act is published in the Gazette, a day after presidential assent. It was passed as a money bill, which kept the Rajya Sabha's amendments from binding the Lok Sabha.
2. 24 August 2017. Nine judges of the Supreme Court unanimously hold that privacy is a fundamental right, in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd) v Union of India.⁶
3. 26 September 2018. Five judges uphold Aadhaar 4 to 1, but strike down section 57, which let private companies demand it. Banks, mobile companies and schools can no longer make it a condition of service. Justice D.Y. Chandrachud dissents, holding the Act unconstitutional because it should not have been passed as a money bill.⁶
4. July 2019. Parliament passes the Aadhaar and Other Laws (Amendment) Act. Using Aadhaar becomes voluntary in law, offline verification is introduced, and section 57 is removed.⁷
5. April 2022. The CAG's UIDAI audit is tabled in Parliament.⁵
6. August 2023. India enacts the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, its first general data protection law.
7. October 2024. 138.3 crore Aadhaar numbers have been issued.⁸

Why Australia was reading about Aadhaar

FinTech Australia used Aadhaar as a warning as much as a model. Its submission said Australia's "cultural context would not permit the development of a centralised Government-built, and Government-controlled system as has been done in India via Aadhaar", and pointed to the "ill-fated Australia Card" as evidence.¹ The Australia Card, a national ID proposal of the mid-1980s, was abandoned in 1987 after public opposition.

The review that received the submission reported at the end of 2017 with 50 recommendations, and in May 2018 the government agreed to build a Consumer Data Right, starting with banking.⁹ India and Australia reached the same question from opposite ends: India built one identity layer for a billion people first and argued about privacy in court afterwards; Australia argued first.

How to read an Aadhaar number

• Convert carefully. One lakh is 100,000. One crore is 10 million. Rs 1,000 crore is Rs 10 billion.
• Ask who measured it. A ministry's estimate of savings and an auditor's finding are different kinds of evidence.
• Ask what else changed. The cooking-gas savings coincided with a crash in oil prices.
• "Deleted" is not "fake". Removed records include duplicates, the dead, people who moved and people wrongly excluded.
• Check the date. Figures from before the 2018 judgment describe a system that was then mandatory for far more services than it is now.