Government Trusts Aadhaar on Welfare. It Needs to Rely on It to Make Voter Lists

Trust the Technology You Already Use Every Day Here is the

position: the Election Commission should replace door-to-door electoral roll verification with a voluntary Aadhaar-based face authentication system, because the state already trusts this exact technology to move citizens through airports and to pay their pensions.

The Reasoning The Special Intensive

Revision currently underway has deleted over 13 crore names using a document-intensive, house-to-house method mothballed for two decades - one that mobilises 10 lakh officials, costs thousands of crores every cycle and falls hardest on the poor, elderly, migrants and women who struggle to produce paperwork within compressed deadlines.

Aadhaar's face authentication already performs the same underlying tasks - proving a person is alive, unique and resident at a claimed address - at scale, cheaply and with a fully auditable trail. More than 10 crore Digi Yatra transactions and 1.47 crore pensioners verified through Jeevan Pramaan show the infrastructure works.

If the state trusts it to release pensions, it should trust it to clean a voter list.

The Strongest Counter-Argument

But there is a serious objection: Aadhaar, by statute, is not proof of citizenship. Section 9 of the Aadhaar Act says so explicitly and the Supreme Court's own May 2026 ruling - the one upholding SIR - drew the line precisely here, assigning citizenship determination exclusively to the Ministry of Home Affairs.

Building a roll-cleaning system on Aadhaar risks quietly collapsing two distinct questions - "is this a real, unique, resident individual" and "is this individual a citizen"

• into one database that was never designed to answer the second question at all. That collapse is exactly what went wrong with Assam's National Register of Citizens, which excluded 19 lakh people using flawed proxies for citizenship.

Why the Position Still Holds

This objection is powerful against a system that uses Aadhaar to decide who is a citizen. It is much weaker against the system actually being proposed, which does not ask Aadhaar to answer that question at all. The proposal only uses face authentication to confirm identity, residence and uniqueness - precisely the powers Section 9 grants it - while explicitly routing any genuine citizenship dispute to the MHA, exactly where the Supreme Court says it belongs.

The failure of Assam's NRC was not that biometric tools were used, but that citizenship itself was being decided in the field. A system built to identify everyone first and refer only outliers to the MHA, respects the very jurisdictional boundary the Court drew, rather than crossing it.

TAN's position is that Aadhaar-based authentication should replace manual SIR for identity verification, provided the citizenship question stays exactly where the Court put it - with the MHA, never with an electoral officer's doorstep judgment.