On Sunday the 25th of May last year, over 600,000 people queued up at over 2,300 locations across India. Many of them had been preparing for this day for years. Many had already been through this once, twice, even five times or more. Some were doing this for the first time, surrounded by weary veterans of this crusade. And all of them were after the same thing.

That’s right, folks. It’s the UPSC Prelims. God help them all.

A quick primer: India recruits its most of its central civil servants through a single competitive exam process, the unimaginatively-named Civil Services Examination. The actual number of services one can join by passing the exam is expansive – ranging from the Railway Management Service to the Corporate Law Service – but the holy grail for most applicants lies is the trio at the very top: the Police Service (IPS), the Foreign Service (IFS) and the sanctum sanctorum, the Administrative Service (IAS).

If you’re Indian, you probably already know this even if you’ve never considered taking the test. That’s because these exams are some of the biggest events in India. Rising applicant numbers are the subjects of countless newspaper headlines every exam season, ‘toppers’ who rank first become instant celebrities, and an entire coaching industry worth hundreds of millions of dollars has sprung up to beat knowledge into the heads of the horde of hopefuls every year. In recent years, Bollywood has cashed in on the craze with multiple popular movies and streaming shows about the exams and their hopefuls.

All in all: it would be an unpardonable understatement to say the exams are a big deal. And that raises an interesting question – how did they get so big? What explains the explosion of applicant numbers in recent decades? And what has this done to India?

Where did civil service exams come from?

Like any randomly chosen plastic good, electronic device, or fast-fashion crop top: China. Probably.

As far as we know, competitive civil service exams developed during the Tang Dynasty in the 600s, and matured during the Ming in the 1600s as a tiered system. Young, elite Chinese men (no women allowed!) hoped to pass each level of tests, from town to province and finally to the exams, held by custom at the Imperial Palace in the capital and supposedly observed by the Emperor himself. Passing that final stage conferred a degree known as jinshi, with the names of these hallowed scholars posted on the walls for all to see. Town criers rode through the streets shouting the names of these revered few, and their hometowns would throw lavish celebrations on hearing the news.

Just passing any level of the exams conferred a number of attractive privileges – wide tax exemptions for life, freedom from conscription, lessened punishment for crimes. But the real draw remained the prospect of a job. Jinshi holders were catapulted directly into the top ranks of the Imperial administration; many would go on to serve as powerful scholar-bureaucrats, shaping the course of a dynasty and sending reverberations through history.

Passing the exams was a big deal. If you were a member of the literate Chinese elite (and by social mores barred from anything as ugly as commerce) it was the only deal around.

What were these intrepid scholars being tested on? Statecraft? Economics? The law? Nope. Confucius (Kǒngzǐ to his friends) – specifically, the Four Books and Five Classics, which are as close to holy texts as Confucianism has. If you, a hot-blooded Song-era literatus with dreams of power, wanted to ace the exams and take that first step on the road to fame, you needed to know these nine texts inside out.

And I mean really know them. There are over 500,000 characters that make up these books, each one representing a word, and candidates were expected to memorize every single one. A number of questions were of the form ‘fill in the blank’, where a random line from one of the texts would be given with the middle characters removed; the candidate had to reproduce the entire line, with no mistakes, and identify exactly which text it came from and where (a millennium later, we use similar tasks to train large language models like ChatGPT). Other questions would be sneakier: for instance, a question might provide a single line from the texts, and instruct the candidate to provide commentary on the line that follows it.

If this seems like a system entirely divorced from the practicalities of governance, that’s because it was. For centuries, there was even a poetry component! The Chinese imperial exams weren’t really about proving your knowledge of governance; they were about demonstrating your fluency in the intellectual culture of the Chinese elite. Granted, it wasn’t all totally irrelevant – Confucius and his disciples had much to say about taxation, jurisprudence, and statecraft – but the emphasis was never on practical problem-solving ability.

By the later years of the Qing, the drawbacks of this system had become abundantly clear in the face of increasing pressure to modernize China. Furious arguments raged over the role of the exams, and the insular clique of conservative scholar-bureaucrats they created, in holding the country back from progress. The last few decades of exams actually experimented with adding in a few questions of relevance: the 1904 exams, the very last ever held, featured a section on current political issues amidst the usual Confucian discussions. Questions included:

“日本变法之初，聘用西人而国以日强，埃及用外国人至千余员，遂至失财政裁判之权而国以不振。试详言其得失利弊策.”

That is, roughly:

“When Japan first undertook its reforms, it hired Westerners, and the country consequently became stronger. Egypt, on the other hand, employed over a thousand foreigners, and thereby came to lose control over its own financial and judicial institutions, with the country then failing to prosper. Try to explain in detail their successes and failures, advantages and disadvantages, and the policies involved.”

This sort of question is probably recognizable to any Indian aspirant - it’s not far off from the ‘short essay’ questions you’d find in a UPSC exam today. For the Qing, it came too little, too late, and the exams were abolished in 1905, never to return.

But they lived on! Like so many other exotic relics from around the world, the British Empire admired this system and thought it would be nice to have at home as a conversation piece. So the exams took on a new life as:

The Indian Civil Service Exams

Until the 1850s, India had been governed largely by the British East India Company, a (technically) private enterprise whose top administrative staff were recruited in London through systems of influence and patronage – new recruits required a nomination from one of the company’s 24 directors, so it was really a matter of who you knew, not what. When the British government started muscling in, it forced the Company to end patronage and recruit its staff through competitive exams.

Interestingly, the Charter Act of 1853 – the law that began transferring many of the Company’s functions to the British government – specifically allowed Indians to take the exams. In practice few ever made it. Why? Well, here’s the grading breakdown for the very first exams, held in 1855.

Keen-eyed readers will notice a few puzzling things. First, Greco-Roman subjects (including two dead languages) weigh twice as much as the optional paper in Sanskrit/Arabic. Second, the exam did not test for knowledge of any of India’s actual spoken languages. One would think being able to communicate with the people you govern would be more useful for a civil servant than being able to quote Thucydides; clearly, the British government took a very different view.

Small wonder that successful British candidates outnumbered Indians by some 20 to 1. It didn’t help that exams weren’t even held in India until 1922. The first Indian to pass the exams was Satyendranath Tagore (brother to the famed writer) in 1863, after years of intensive study with the resources of a wealthy family behind him. A handful of others joined him in the decades until the system was overhauled by the Montague-Chelmsford Reforms, which aimed to address rising popular discontent by making the civil service 50% Indian; exams were finally held in India, and the content was reworked to be more relevant to the actual governance of the country. The reforms also set up the predecessor of the body that still runs the exams, the Public Service Commission.

And then, in 1947, the Empire packed up and left. The ~1000-odd Indian Civil Service was just about half Indian on the eve of Independence. While many British civil servants were invited to stay on by the new nation, almost all of them chose to leave. The Civil Service was left to reconstruct itself as completely Indian. And that’s exactly what it did, renaming itself the Union Public Services Commission (hence the famous UPSC acronym) and creating its own system of exams and interviews to decide who would help build this new nation.

I’m not sure they foresaw just many people would one day apply. I’m not sure anyone did.

Which raises the question:

Where are all these applicants coming from?

Shortly before independence, there was 1 Civil Service officer for every 300,000 people in India, which then included present-day Pakistan and Bangladesh. Today, that ratio is about the same, with about 5,500 serving IAS officers against a population of close to 1.5 billion. New vacancies are added slowly, if at all; the IAS is actually operating at about 1,000 posts below its allowed maximum.

So if the number of positions has remained about the same, relative to population, why are they so competitive today? What’s really changed is just how many people are trying to get those jobs. The second annual report of the then-renamed UPSC, which covers 1952, is illuminating. About 3,200 candidates actually appeared for the combined competitive exam meant to recruit for the IAS, IPS, and other Central Services; after a subsequent round of interviews, 59 of them were ‘declared successful’, which meant about 1 in 55 exam-takers ended up finally getting through. That’s an ultimate success rate of ~2%, which would still make it one of the most competitive recruitment processes in the world today.

Fast forward 70 years to the year 2022. India’s population has multiplied by 4; the number of people actually taking the exam, on the other hand, has multiplied by 180. In total, 933 candidates were ‘recommended’ for posts in 2022, which gives us a ratio of over 600 disappointed exam-takers for every success – a pass rate of one-sixth of a percent.

(Note: In any given year, about half the people who apply for the preliminary exam don’t really take it. To make things more precise, I’m only using figures for people who do show up.)

And a lot of this increased competitiveness is comparatively recent. Between 2002 and 2022, India’s population grew by about 30%. Meanwhile, the number of people appearing for the exam grew by 250%. Why?

For one thing, it’s easier than ever to prepare for the exams. The Internet has democratized the resources needed to study. Years of past question papers are available, from independent sources and the UPSC’s own website; study guides and model essays are freely downloadable, or available with an online subscription. This doesn’t stop legions of aspirants from frequenting coaching centers and full-time prep classes, but it does mean taking that first step is easier.

Plus, India is now younger than ever – two in every three Indians is below 35. The exam is only open to applicants between the ages of 21 and 32 in the general category, up from a maximum age of 24 when it started out. That group constitutes a larger fraction of the overall population today than at any other time in our history.

But perhaps the most important single change has been education. To sit the exam, you need to have at least a Bachelor’s degree or equivalent; as far as I can tell, this has been a requirement since the very earliest days of the system. In 1947, when we became independent, India saw on the order of 50,000 people a year graduate with Bachelor’s degrees (going off a figure of about 200,000 in total enrolled in higher education). Today, that number has multiplied by a factor of 200 – it’s grown 50 times faster than the general population. You’ll note that this is in the same order of magnitude as the multiplication in the number of exam-takers.

Combining all this, it’s easy to say as a first-order estimate that when you control for these factors – especially education – today’s applicant numbers make perfect sense. And yet, I don’t think that’s all of it. Because our number of qualified applicants has exploded since the 1950s – but so has our private sector, which employs the vast majority of educated Indians today. Why is it that, in the face of steady economic growth that multiplied our GDP by a factor of 5 between 2000 and 2020, the proportion of people trying to get a government job has only grown?

You’d expect, intuitively, that proportionately fewer educated Indians would favor the civil service – with its fairly low salary ceiling (INR 250,000 a month for the nation’s top bureaucrat; even accounting for the perks, the top levels of industry pay much more) and extremely difficult entry process – over the private sector. But that hasn’t happened. Application numbers increase every year, still growing faster than population. What’s going on?

When do government jobs get more popular?

Why do people lust after government jobs? In countries like India, government positions have long been seen as high-prestige, reliable, and above all secure – unless you mess up spectacularly, you have a job for life, and a pension after you hit mandatory retirement.

In China, this is known as the ‘iron rice bowl’, and has been a thorn in the side of reformers since the days of Deng Xiaoping. For a while, China’s booming economy lured people away from government jobs; the civil service exam, the Guokao (not to be confused with the equally competitive college entrance exam, the Gaokao), actually saw total applications fall by a over 100,000 from from 2013 to 2014, both years in which the country’s GDP grew by almost 8% and its population by over 7 million.

Now, with economic growth slowing and harsh private-sector hours taking their toll, China’s working-age youth are quietly rebelling by ‘lying flat’ – gravitating toward stable work that requires the bare minimum of effort and giving up on fiscal ambition. Where else to look but government jobs? Civil service applications are once again high and still growing. China, too, puts an age ceiling on applicants, recently raised from 35 to 38. With an aging population, the median Chinese is already too old to apply – which makes it remarkable that applicant numbers are soaring even as the eligible population is shrinking. Almost 3 million people in China sat the exams in 2025, a number that has doubled in a decade.

South Korea, while much wealthier in comparison, has also seen civil service applications fluctuate with its economic fortunes. In 2019, as the economy slowed amidst a US-China trade war, applications for government jobs started increasing. They surged in 2021, in response to a post-COVID hiring slump. By 2025, applications had fallen by half, hitting their lowest level since 2017 (a year in which the country’s GDP grew by a respectable 3.1%). This is despite a comparative slowdown in job growth at South Korea’s chaebol super-conglomerates; for now, the country’s youth are optimistic about opportunities outside the public sector.

In Japan, the late 1990s and early 2000s saw real wages stop growing entirely; the civil service suddenly became everyone’s dream again as stable, well-paid jobs became scarce. As things got better, that trend quickly reversed: after 2012, applications for government jobs dropped precipitously, falling over 30% over the next decade. As Japan’s economy slowly rebounds from its lost decades after the crisis of 1995, top graduates of the elite Tokyo University no longer flock to the civil service, and the Japanese government is exploring ways to tempt the country’s best back to government work.

The pattern is clear. When the economy’s doing well and job growth is high, people move away from government jobs. When the economy slows down, people rush for the stability of the civil service.

That is, everywhere except India.

As we’ve seen, Chinese demand for government jobs once dropped by almost 10% in a single year. The only comparable drop in UPSC exam-takers in recent memory was recorded in 2020 – not coincidentally, the year in which the COVID-19 pandemic severely disrupted the exam. And this drop didn’t even last the entire pandemic! Within two years, numbers had more or less recovered - and they’re still going up. So…

What Makes India Different?

Is it just an unquenchable mania for government work? A patriotic fervor? A social expectation. Maybe – but there is one more explanation. We’ve already seen that China’s demand for these government jobs dropped sharply in just one year, after 2013. I think China’s meteoric growth at the time had something to do with it. But I suspect there was one more factor. See, something else happened in 2013.

In late 2012, Xi Jinping ascended to the lofty post of General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee – the position that brings with it de facto leadership of the country. Shortly afterward, he made corruption a key part of his agenda; he promised to go after the ‘tigers’, Party leaders enriching themselves, and the ‘flies’, low-level bureaucrats. Over the next two years, some of China’s highest officials were convicted of corruption, thrown out of the Party, and sentenced to long prison terms.

As for the ‘flies’? Between 2011 and 2013, the number of low-level officials punished went up by over a quarter; some 180,000 were punished in 2013, the first full year of Xi’s anti-corruption campaign. By 2016, that number more than doubled to 415,000, making it abundantly clear that Xi was very serious about it.

The campaign has been extensively studied by economists and political scientists, and the common conclusion is: the number and quality of applicants decreased because the perceived monetary value of the jobs – most of which was ‘informal’ i.e. corruption – had decreased. Smart, ambitious would-be applicants realized they’d make less money off corruption, and would be more likely to get caught, so they decided it wasn’t worth the payoff.

Meanwhile in India, the UPSC continues to attract fast-increasing numbers of applicants every year, among them some very high quality candidates. This means one of two things:

a) This China model doesn’t apply here - even with wages in the private sector increasing while government salaries remain stagnant, educated Indians are just so full of patriotic pride that they don’t mind the low pay for the chance to make a difference to the country.

OR:

b) The China model still applies – and educated Indians know that the real wages of a government job far outweigh the possibilities of the private sector. Despite periodic anticorruption campaigns, the perceived ‘corruption premium’ of these jobs remains very, very high, and the possibility of being caught and punished remains very, very low.

And this is pretty well known – everyone assumes these jobs come with a corruption premium way above their nominal salaries. Corruption is endemic in India at all levels of the bureaucracy. Is that where all these applicants are coming from - people wanting their own piece of the pie?

The Protection Premium

There’s another aspect to it that I think lots of Indians recognize, but few really articulate, that makes India very different from China.

I started this by telling you about 12th Fail, the movie about a young man with dreams of joining the Indian Police Service. That dream didn’t come out of nowhere – early in the movie, his brother is framed and locked up by the local cops on the order of a local elected official. Our plucky protagonist begs a recently-arrived Indian Police Service officer to intervene; awed by the officer’s ability to see justice done with just a few words, he resolves to become one himself.

Great story about an inspiring, upright police officer, right? Sure… but why was his intervention needed? Unfortunately, because we live in an India where a random local politician can order you arrested, your rights can be ignored, the rule of law is weak, and unless you’re wealthy or powerful, there’s pretty much nothing you can do about it. Or maybe a friendly IPS officer will show up to save you – there’s less than 5,000 in the country, so good luck with that.

Naturally, this factor is less relevant in countries where you can rely on the government, police, justice system, and bureaucracy to do their jobs with relative impartiality – and that’s reflected in the number of people who want in. Over in America, despite the police’s reputation for power and impunity, many police forces have trouble getting enough applicants and run understaffed. The UK has similar issues, as do many industrialized nations. Even though salaries are often generous, there just isn’t any point being part of the police when they’re so constrained – you don’t often need to be part of the government to be safe from the government.

Meanwhile in India, even low-level constable posts routinely see over a hundred applicants for every vacancy. Last year’s critically-acclaimed movie Homebound features two young Indian men, one a Dalit and the other a Muslim, taking the state-level police exam with a horde of other hopefuls because they believe the power of the uniform will erase the disadvantages of their caste and religion; nobody pushes around a police constable.

The private sector is no shield in India; despite strong economic growth over the last decades, any private sector operator is vulnerable to interference from the state that can, in extremis, lead to state-sponsored ruin. The only shield is being part of the system itself.

That’s why our system isn’t like China’s. Not because the Chinese state is less oppressive, but because being part of the government doesn’t actually protect you from the government. China is, famously, one of very few countries in the world that hands down death penalties for corruption – those sentences are often ‘suspended’ to just life in prison, but the possibility is very real.

Even at the lower levels, the price of petty corruption is high. In 2013, a bridge collapsed in Jiangyou; the resulting investigation put a local official in prison for 14 years, amidst other convictions. He was still luckier than a deputy local Party secretary who was sentenced to death (albeit suspended) for taking a $20,000 bribe from a bridge contractor in 1999. In post-Deng China, taking a bribe to approve a shoddy bridge will see you punished; China’s government, from the top ranks to the bottom, is periodically purged of those embarrassing the Party. Being in the system won’t save you from the system – in some ways, it makes you even less safe from scrutiny by the Party.

Meanwhile, in 2022, a bridge collapsed in Morbi, Gujarat, killing 141. The local municipality’s chief officer was suspended, but seems to have suffered no other consequences; the municipality has denied any responsibility. According to Indian law, a public servant can’t be prosecuted without specific sanction of the government, either state or central depending on where they work; in an incisive editorial, Kingshuk Nag, then an editor with the Times of India, makes it clear just how difficult that is. In India, the system protects its own.

People like money and power, but people also like to feel safe – to know that if the weight of state power ever pits itself against them, they have options. I suspect a lot of people feel like you can’t beat them, but you can join them, be them.

And so, every year, over half a million people line up for a shot at entering the ranks of the powerful. What does it cost us?

The Hidden Costs of the UPSC

A bare handful of the 100,000s who try every year will make it through the UPSC. What of the rest – those who’ve spent years prepping for these exams, only to fall short? What happens to them afterward?

We don’t know the answer for the UPSC but we can guess, thanks to Kunal Mangal. While he was a graduate student at Harvard, Mangal tracked the outcomes of people who tried to get into the civil service of the state of Tamil Nadu, through its own exam system, right as it instituted a hiring freeze that multiplied competitiveness.

Mangal compared a particular cohort – the group of male Tamil Nadu residents graduating college during the hiring freeze – to the cohort that graduated college right after the freeze, as well as to the same population in neighboring states. While he had no way of separating out only the actual applicants, he believed recent college graduates were a reasonable approximation – apparently, a quarter or more of college graduates in Tamil Nadu apply for the exams. He then used household survey data to track this group’s outcomes over the years.

(Note: Mangal notes that he tracks only males because Tamil Nadu’s female labor force participation was low enough that it would be difficult to detect changes.)

The way Mangal sees it, this group of people took more time to study for the exams in response to the increased competitiveness – and therefore removed themselves from the labour force when they’d otherwise be early in private industry careers. There weren’t any major economic movements or demand-side shocks in Tamil Nadu during this period. Nor could the impact on their lives be ascribed to their failure to get the civil service jobs, since only a tiny fraction were ever going to make it through even before vacancies were reduced. The only real difference was this hiring freeze, and their behavior in response to it.

And the result? This group of recent college graduates had measurably worse outcomes in many areas even a decade after the exams. They were less likely to run businesses, more likely to end up in lower-quality private employment, and still more likely to report being ‘unoccupied’ well into their 30s. They were more likely to live with their parents or guardians, and less likely to have married or start families; their households had lower consumption numbers, a strong proxy for income. And remember, if Mangal is correct, all these dramatic disadvantages came from one source: the years they spent trying to get into the civil service.

To the best of my knowledge, nobody’s done something similar for the UPSC’s own exams; given that aspirants come from all over the country, any survey dataset trying to cover it would have to be massive and comprehensive. That being said, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if similar effects played out at the national level – and it’s baffling how little anyone has cared to look into the trajectories of failed UPSC aspirants. The news does the occasional piece about it, like this one from The Print, but there’s very little effort to track outcomes and figure out what becomes of these disappointed millions. Anecdotally, most probably end up doing alright (eventually), but in the counterfactual world where they didn’t decide to try for the UPSC, where might they have been? Sadly, we’ll never know.

The effects go beyond economic. Plenty of anecdotal data and small-scale surveys reveal sharp drops in mental health among aspirants. Newspaper routinely carry tragic stories of suicides among applicants after exam results are made public; overall student suicides in India rose 65% between 2013 and 2023.

Needless to say, very few people trying for the civil service are having a good time.

But there’s another aspect to this: what are the costs to the country? Civil service aspirants are an extremely selected pool. They’re young, since they have to be between 21 and 32 in most cases. They all have at least college degrees, making them more educated than 85% of Indian adults. And many of them are ambitious, driven, and hardworking. What this means is that every year, hundreds of thousands of the most potentially productive people in the Indian economy remove themselves from it by choosing to study for the UPSC instead.

And for many of them, the process consumes years of their lives. These days, the average successful aspirant is 27, and has given the exam at least three times before getting through.

I don’t know what the total cost to the economy is. Nobody does – there’s no academic work on the topic at all. But I suspect it’s much higher than is comfortable to think about.

Whither UPSC?

Every year, the exams get more popular. Every so often, someone tries to fix them. A few committees over the years have recommended that the maximum applicant age be lowered to 27; among other reasons, data from across the world shows that civil servants who join later are less productive throughout their careers. The government has not done that, in large part because it would cut out a massive cohort of civil service hopefuls who’d find themselves aged out much earlier – apparently, the faint hope of getting through at the very end is worth preserving.

Other committees thought it would be a good idea to let narrowly unsuccessful candidates – those who got through everything except the interview – fast-track into other government positions not covered by the UPSC. This was implemented in part, but there aren’t many of those positions either.

There’s been talk about extending recruitment to professionals in their 40s, which is probably a good idea – plenty of other civil services recruit primarily from people who’ve already done a stint in the private sector, and are better off for it.

But small changes aside, the UPSC in its current form is probably here to stay. We’re entering an era of global economic uncertainty, and every productive, educated Indian will be needed. Unfortunately, that turmoil is probably going to drive even more of them to years of textbooks, tuitions, and tests. That should concern us all.

Of course, Bollywood – having finally found a topic that consistently gets them an audience – will probably keep making movies and TV about the process. In this, they’re not unlike the Chinese, who loved writing about the exams. The difference is, the Chinese weren’t always positive about them.

The 18th-century author Wu Jingzi, himself a disappointed applicant, wrote a famous novel, The Scholars, that is shot through with biting satire of the Chinese Imperial exams and their hopefuls. Characters include archetypes familiar to any Indian test-taker, like a miserly student fretting over the cost of a candlestick on his deathbed, and an expensive tutor expounding spiritual wisdom while shamelessly exploiting his students.

Amidst it all is Fan Jin, a hapless scholar who’s failed the exam time after time, and made himself a figure of scorn to his friends and family – who beat and berate him more with every failure. And then, he finally makes it. When someone tells him he’s got through:

“When Fan Jin heard the news, he clapped his hands and laughed. ‘Ha! I’ve passed! I’ve passed!’ Then he fell down in a dead faint.”

Fan Jin proceeds to go insane – laughing uncontrollably, running head-first into walls, and accusing the villagers of being demons. At his hour of triumph, the system has broken him.

Maybe that’s just what the UPSC is really testing – not how smart we are, or how prepared, but how insane we’re willing to be.

That’s right. It’s mango season.

So, I love mangoes. Everyone around me loves mangoes. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t love mangoes (but I pity them).

My home city of Mumbai, India’s economic hub, is a land of eye-popping inequality where some of the world’s wealthiest people live a literal stone’s throw from some of its poorest. Few things truly unite the richest billionaires and the poorest laborers, but one feeling reliably crosses that divide: the eager anticipation of mangoes. Every April, the city rejoices when boxes full of bright, plump fruits finally populate store shelves and street carts, bringing blissful relief from the sweltering tropical heat. Beloved of figures from Alexander the Great (supposedly) to the Mughal Emperor Akbar, mangoes are considered a sacred fruit – a symbol of pleasure and good fortune.

How tragic, then, that so few outside India will ever bite into an Indian mango. Instead, walk into a supermarket in Canada or Germany, and you’ll see shelves full of ripe, plump mangoes from Mexico and Peru. Mangoes are relatively recent transplants to these countries – but they now dominate the mango trade to the high-value markets of North America and Europe. Elsewhere, Brazil and Thailand have made steady gains. In exports, India doesn’t even break the top 5. We grow 4 in every 10 worldwide – but almost all of those disappear down the gullets of eager, hungry Indians. We export less than a single percent of our production.

It’s not just distant South America that’s ramping up their mango game. Mangoes used to be such an exotic rarity in China that a cult briefly formed around them at the height of the Cultural Revolution; the zealous students running the movement preserved them with wax and built shrines on which to display them. Now, they grow enough to rapidly scale up exports – according to some reports (and the Chinese government’s own data), they might exceed India! We continue to fall behind our rivals in selling our most beloved fruit to hungry consumers worldwide, thereby failing to profit from a global market worth over $3 billion for fresh mangoes alone.

And we take that personally. When a shipment of Indian mangoes was recently turned away from America in May for supposed documentation problems, the incident made headlines across our country. Against the scale of our economy, Mangoes aren’t a truly significant export for us. At ~$60 million a year (for fresh mangoes), they’re a blip in our overall export revenue. We export twice as much in car parts to America alone, and over 600x more in textiles worldwide. But mangoes are different – they’re a proud symbol of India, our national fruit, admired around the world for thousands of years. In that respect, our failure to truly put our pride and joy on the plates of the world is galling.

But mangoes are just the start. Our sluggish mango exports are symptomatic of our general failure to seize high-value agricultural exports. The country’s diverse climates and soils, and experienced agricultural workforce, should lend themselves to growing a medley of high-value export crops – we’re just not growing them.

Cacao exports from India, for one, have remained negligible despite an unprecedented doubling of global prices in recent months. There were actually brief, earlier efforts to grow the bean for export in the 1970s, which were strangled in their crib by logistical issues and a global glut that depressed prices. But thanks to our tropical climate and geographic position, India is ideally placed to grow cacao, which can only really be grown in the ‘cacao belt’ — a narrow band around the equator.

While some is grown in South America, and some in Asia, the African countries marked in red account for the majority of all cacao production. But for how long? Many of these places are, unfortunately, politically unstable (and sometimes active conflict zones), which isn’t conducive to exports. And despite efforts, a lot of cacao is grown with what’s effectively slave labor; international buyers have been pressured to cease dealing with these places unless the cacao can be certified slavery-free (a few certifications, like Fair Trade Cacao, exist for this).

India’s rural labor situation isn’t perfect, but it’s not slavery - we easily meet certification requirements to export to the wealthy West. We’d also find it relatively easy to meet other standards, like the current European Union rules that limit imports of cacao linked to deforested land. This gives us a huge leg up - there’s nothing stopping us presenting ourselves as a more stable, more ethical alternative to the current top cacao sellers.

And it’s so lucrative! Cacao demand continues to climb rapidly worldwide, and supply hasn’t kept up. Starting 2023, chocolate demand spiked; meanwhile, bad weather conditions hit the harvest in top producers like Ghana and the Ivory Coast. The result?

While prices have been erratic this year to date, they remain at multiples of their 2023 levels. There’s a huge gap in the market waiting to be filled - but India isn’t in a position to fill it. We just don’t grow enough cacao.

Meanwhile avocados, the fruit du jour of the last decade, are grown so little in the country that India has specifically sought out import deals with South American producers to keep domestic prices down in the face of climbing homegrown demand. When fast-growing Mexican fast food chain California Burrito wanted avocados, they had to resort to growing 500 trees of their own. As one might guess, the country exports almost no avos, missing out on a market that by some metrics is worth $20 billion worldwide and growing fast – instead, we spend our hard-earned forex buying them so I can make my weekly bowl of guac.

So where does India’s reputation as a prominent agricultural exporter come from? We are one – just not in high-value products. The majority of our crop exports still lie in low-value, high volume products like wheat and rice. These have historically been seen as a safer bet by farmers owing to predictable global demand and the safety net of official price floors. In recent years, however, these staple exports have been an unsteady prospect; prices have fluctuated with global events like the War in Ukraine, and the sector has seen export bans and stoppages by the Indian government to tame food inflation in India’s crowded cities. Arguably, high global wheat prices have failed to benefit most Indian farmers anyway: according to economists like Jean Drèze, real (inflation-adjusted) farm wages have stagnated since 2014, a fact unchanged by record wheat and rice exports in the chaotic years of 2021 and 2022.

A large part of the problem with high-value products lies in the lack of public or private investment into meeting the quality and safety standards of destination countries. Just look at mangoes. Countries like America demand that the fruit be treated with radiation before it’s shipped. For the longest time, India had only a single official facility to irradiate mangoes. While we’re now spinning up more facilities, irradiation remains expensive – at INR 35/kg according to one source (though this may vary), it eats into farmer profit margins, and we haven’t scaled up irradiation enough for economies of scale to to bring down costs significantly.

Quality problems led the EU to ban Indian mangoes for a year in 2014, while America refused to approve imports from 2019 to 2022. This quality problem reaches beyond just fruits – India’s vaunted spice exports, which bring in billions of dollars a year, have seen contamination allegations from multiple countries that threaten the entire industry and could lose us hundreds of millions a year in export earnings – a much higher number than our overall mango exports.

But the problems start even earlier than the quality checks. Farmers need to actually get the goods to an irradiation facility, and India being what it is, freight can be expensive and difficult – per the Times of India last year, transport for mangoes can cost 2x their actual retail price. Transport channels are also largely unrefrigerated – we don’t have the kind of cold chain penetration for storage and transport that countries like Mexico have invested heavily in to bolster exports. According to organizations like the UN’s FAO, as much as 1 in 3 fruits or vegetables grown in India is lost to spoilage after harvest, and the ones bound for export are no exception.

What makes the entire situation more tragic is that we know India is eminently capable of producing success stories in high-value agricultural exports. Just smell the coffee.

A generation ago, India exported almost no coffee. This year, almost $2 billion worth will be shipped out of Indian ports, a number that’s doubled inside of a decade and is showing no signs of slowing down – the state of Karnataka just saw coffee export earnings rise 60% in a single year.

The interesting thing is that the quantities of coffee being shipped out haven’t changed much. Our coffee exports have surged in value, not weight. Indian coffee growers aren’t trying to make money on volume. Instead, they’re aggressively pursuing high-value markets and moving up the value chain. They’ve taken advantage of the global price rally – off increased global demand and weak production in major players like Brazil and Vietnam – to ship to rich markets, and invested in value-additive processing to push up sales prices. Combine that with smart branding (‘estate’ brands for one) and quality grading to meet export standards – and suddenly Indian coffee commands much higher prices than it used to.

The Coffee Board deserves a mention here. A venerable institution that predates India’s independence, the Board has lately been assisting producers with grading and quality assurance, helping them comply with export standards, and easing the export process by moving towards instant, all-digital licenses. Every Indian export organization could learn a lesson from what they’ve done: remove obstacles to export, don’t add new ones.

I don’t see why we can’t reproduce this for avocados, for cacao – and for mangoes. And we should. It’s not just about raw numbers; we’re always going to make much, much more money exporting iPhones and T-shirts than mangoes. But high-value agriculture has a disproportionate impact on Indian farmers, who have been in a sustained crisis for years because India’s economic growth has in many ways failed to make its way to them. Finding high-value agricultural export niches, and aggressively pursuing them, is an imperative; it’s not particularly expensive, holds out the prospect of very high ROI, and will direct its profits to the people who need them most.

It’s about time.

Last year, a man named Baburam Bhil entered a local school near his home village in the state of Rajasthan, armed with a knife. He proceeded to stab a few teachers, take students hostage, and generally menace everyone until he was apprehended by the local police. This wasn’t a normal stabbing – it had an interesting motive. Apparently, Bhil found out that he had been declared legally dead. The government had a death certificate for him on file. This, naturally, made life slightly awkward. When Bhil’s attempts to fix the problem through the bureaucracy went nowhere, he resorted to committing a crime to force the state to recognize that he was still very much among the living; he hoped, perhaps naively, that they couldn’t actually prosecute him without declaring him alive first.

The case was bizarre enough that it made news across India, and even the world (assuming the New York Post counts). Interestingly enough, this is far from the first such incident in India. Cases like Bhil’s are common enough that they formed the plot of the 2021 Bollywood movie Kaagaz (literally ‘papers’). The causes vary: sometimes bureaucratic mistakes have been blamed, sometimes it’s supposedly relatives trying to get their hands on land or property. There have been enough cases – often in North India, where populations are large and the legal system can be especially sluggish – that victims even have their own advocacy group, the Association of the Dead. The group believes there to be thousands of cases in the state of Uttar Pradesh alone; the true number nationwide is unknown. With many of these people lacking the money, political reach, or publicity to level successful legal challenges against the government, cases often move at a glacial pace if at all – the founder of the group was ultimately declared ‘alive’ after eighteen years and countless publicity stunts.

Who says India isn’t a land of miracles? The dead still walk and talk here. They even hold protest marches.

Identity Crisis

There’s a mantra that’s familiar to any Indian who’s ever dealt with the country’s officialdom (which is every Indian), chanted over and over with all the reverence of a ritual:

Aadhar copy.

PAN copy.

Passport copy.

Birth certificate copy…

And so on. Sometimes they throw in interesting little twists, like “electricity bill copy” (even though many people won’t have their names on their bill.) But the same patterns always emerged. Identify yourself. Prove you’re somebody. And if you can’t – good luck getting anything done. It’s a rare Indian that has every single one of these documents. For a large chunk of independent India’s history, most citizens might not even have had any of these. Even today, 1 in 10 Indians – or less – has a passport (for comparison, half the US does, and over 8 in 10 Brits).

Identity documentation has two purposes. For the individual, it’s meant to be a key that opens the door to public services, civic rights, and everything else that a legal status is meant to confer. For the state, it’s a means of verification – proof that someone is who they say they are, that they deserve to walk through that door. The problem is that these two functions aren’t always aligned. For the individual, what’s important is convenience – it should be easy to get your hands on an ID document. For the state, it’s security – making individuals prove that they have the right to a particular ID document. The more difficult it is to get an ID document, the less likely it is that someone who doesn’t have the right to it will obtain it.

Therein lies the paradox. Ease of access is inversely proportional to security. The citizen wants ID documents to be very, very easy to get. The state has an interest in making them as hard to get as possible.

Enter Aadhaar, India’s way of trying to thread this needle. The Aadhaar card was developed by a new organization, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) headed by the universally respected Nandan Nilekani, founder of tech services giant Infosys; the Aadhaar card was launched with a storm of publicity, and projected to be the world’s single most widely issued identity document. It was trumpeted as a visionary idea that would ensure every Indian could easily identify themselves and access the services to which they were entitled, at long last.

Did it work?

Aadhaar: the Good

It would be unfair to dissect Aadhaar’s flaws without making an honest attempt at pointing out the good it has brought – so here are two things Aadhar genuinely has done right:

1. Give people ID.

As late as 2009, when Aadhaar was launched, hundreds of millions of Indians lacked ID documents like a birth certificate or ration card. Whatever Aadhaar’s faults, distribution has genuinely been wide – it took a while, but well over a billion Aadhaar cards have been issued. For millions of people, an Aadhaar card may well have been the first piece of ID documentation they ever possessed. There were a number of attempts, in fact, to make sure that Aadhaar cards would reach populations who needed them the most, like India’s multitudes of urban homeless, or residents of slums and other informal settlements. Theoretically, it’s possible to receive an Aadhaar card without presenting a single piece of ID documentation. ‘Proof of address’ and other requirements can be waived by the use of a ‘care of’ address, or through an ‘introducer’ – a government official, social worker, or similar. Aadhaar enrollment drives have been carried out in orphanages, homeless shelters, and charity/NGO-run institutions to specifically target underserved groups. Whatever else one might say, there have been genuine and sustained efforts to make Aadhaar enrollment inclusive.

2. Be useful.

Aadhaar was built on the promise of access – an ID that would let people in. In many ways, it has done so. People can now use Aadhaar to open bank accounts, get medical treatment, receive scholarships, pensions, subsidies, and cash transfers, verify income tax returns, enroll in schools or universities, and more. For Indians who already had forms of ID, this is simply convenient; for those who did not, it may well have been transformative.

These two cover the main goals of Aadhaar. Its creators were well aware that ID is access. It is the means by which citizens assert their existence in the eyes of the state, and demand access to the privileges, benefits, and protections to which they are entitled. Aadhaar was meant to make it easy for Indians to assert themselves – it was meant above all to improve inclusion and make sure nobody was incorrectly left out of the system.

At least, in theory. The problem is, the Indian state asserted in the beginning that Aadhaar wouldn’t be mandatory for any of these functions. It has largely failed to keep that promise.

And therein lies the problem.

Finally, the Entrée

Let’s talk about food. India’s Public Distribution System is the world’s largest distribution scheme, and possibly the largest single social welfare system in existence in terms of people covered. It provides 800 million people – the population of the United States and the entire European Union combined – with a monthly allotment of free or very heavily subsidized grains, oil, and sugar through a network of ~500,000 Fair Price Shops (better known as ‘ration shops’) across the country. Ours is a country still haunted by the spectre of famines that assailed us both before and after we became independent. The PDS is the Indian state’s guarantee that mass starvation is a thing of the past; a promise that in a free India, nobody will lack basic sustenance.

Access to the system was governed by the possession of a ration card, which are prevalent enough that they’re also a commonly accepted form of ID. Having the card on you, and presenting it to the shopkeeper at the Fair Price Shop for visual verification, was enough to get you your allotment for the month.

Then, in 2012, the government began requiring the PDS to integrate Aadhaar-based verification. Proponents laid out a number of justifications. It would reduce the vast leakage and fraud that permeate the system; it would allow for better data collection and targeting; it would, importantly, allow for the portability of ration cards – with a the security that came with Aadhaar, the same ration card could be used anywhere in the country, where India’s millions of migrant workers once had to cancel their old ration cards and apply for a new one if and when they moved across states (this was dubbed One Nation, One Ration Card).

Under the new system, just having a ration card, or an Aadhar card, was no longer sufficient. Even having both wasn’t enough. Now, ration cards had to be ‘seeded’ – i.e. linked to – Aadhar cards. And even then, customers at ration shops or other PDS locations became subject to biometric verification on site – they’d have to scan their fingerprints, and would be served only if their details matched with those on the central database.

How does this work in practice? Let’s put this narratively: you’re one of India’s millions of rural poor, and you’re trying to get your hands on the rations you’re entitled to from the Public Distribution Scheme. You get your Aadhaar Card, and you believe that, along with your ration card, should be sufficient. But then your state’s government tells everyone that needs to have their Aadhaar Card ‘seeded’ – i.e. linked to their ration card.

Easy enough. Except there are just so many things that can go wrong. Maybe there’s a database error. Or maybe there’s a spelling mismatch between your names on both documents – even just a single letter, accidentally mistyped by an overworked clerk. A computer system will then automatically compare the data, find the mismatch, and reject the ‘seeding’. So now you have to find a way to update your details, or no food for you.

Depending on what you need to change, this may be possible online. If not, you’ll have to queue up at an Aadhaar center in person by showing up in the morning to receive a ‘token’. The centers only give out a limited number of these each morning – if you don’t get one for that day, you’ll have to come back again, and again, until you get a slot. For someone who needs to work every day to feed themself and their family, that’s inconvenient at best and impossible at worst.

But in the end, you managed to fix your details. Now you can go claim your food – except your state’s government has instituted mandatory Aadhaar-Based Biometric Authentication (ABBA, who I assume wouldn’t approve of their musical reputation being invoked here). This requires you to match your fingerprints on a physical terminal at point-of-sale, or no food for you.

And it fails, often. Fingerprints can get worn away with time and hard labor. The scanners themselves degrade with heavy use and insufficient maintenance. Or the point-of-sale just doesn’t have good enough Internet connectivity. Any of these, and countless other possible glitches, will see you automatically rejected. No food for you.

You can argue that these problems are all unlikely. But that’s the danger of building a system that stacks multiple points of failure – the probability of something going wrong multiplies. Maybe the clerk noting down your name for your new ID document has a 90% chance of getting it exactly right so it matches all your other information; maybe the scanner is 90% likely to work; maybe there’s a 90% chance there’ll be reliable Internet; and so on. Each individual link in the chain is overwhelmingly likely to work. But if a system has just 4 checkpoints that are each 90% accurate – it will fail 1 out of every 3 times.

Proponents of mandatory Aadhaar integration argue that rejections due to technical failures account for a small minority of cases. The government’s own figures give the lie to that argument. In 2020, the Comptroller and Auditor General of India, the central government’s auditor, noted that the success rate for fingerprint authentication for ration card use hovered around 75% – in other words, 1 in 4 attempts failed.

To complicate things, the government also embarked on a huge drive to cancel ration cards that weren’t verified with Aadhaar, on the grounds that they must be illegitimate. Millions of ration cards were rendered invalid for this reason. And when it involves food supplies for India’s poorest, the costs can be all too human.

In 2016, an 11-year old girl in the state of Jharkhand died of starvation. Her family had had trouble linking or verifying their Aadhaar card to their ration cards. She was theoretically eligible for school meals under India’s ‘mid-day meal’ scheme, often hailed as a major victory against childhood malnutrition – but that, too, began to require an Aadhaar card linkage. Turned away, she ate nothing for eight days, and died.

She wasn’t the only one; NGOs and rights groups have attempted to track these deaths linked to Aadhaar exclusion, counting dozens just anecdotally, often in India’s most marginalized and vulnerable communities. After reports began emerging, the central government instructed state governments to ensure that nobody was denied food because of biometric failures. Investigations on the ground, however, found inconsistent implementation. The true toll remains unknown.

Doing the Job

These problems unfortunately carry over to another initiative central to Aadhaar – linking it to direct cash payments made under job guarantee schemes like NREGA, the largest public employment scheme in the world. NREGA guarantees 100 days of paid work a year to rural households that apply. 250 million people are registered with NREGA, over 80 million of whom actually do NREGA jobs every year. Along with the food distribution system, NREGA forms the other pillar of India’s expansive social safety net.

Starting in 2017, the government began encouraging job cards to be ‘seeded’ to Aadhar cards and to bank accounts so they could implement an Aadhaar-based Payment System (ABPS) that automatically linked all three together to pay wages quickly and efficiently. NREGA workers are entitled to receive their pay within 15 days of completing the job – this system was meant to make sure they got it.

It was a well-intentioned idea aimed at eliminating endemic payment delays. It also meant that the system was now dealing with three different data points – a bank account, an Aadhaar card, a job card – which multiplied the possible points of failure:

• Any information mismatch would cause registration to be rejected, including minor spelling errors, the presence or a lack of a middle name, etc.

• Not every bank account was ABPS-enabled, which would cause the system to reject the registration

• Biometric failures continued to be a problem

And so on. These aren’t edge cases. At the end of 2023, 1 in 3 NREGA registrants were still ineligible for the ABPS system; among those with active job cards, that figure was 1 in 8. Well over half of workers in large states like Maharashtra and Gujarat are ineligible for ABPS as of earlier this year. I think it hardly needs to be said that a system that excludes a large proportion of the people it’s meant to serve – most people in some states – is not a particularly good system.

As with the ration issue, the government went on mass drives to delete active job cards that failed Aadhaar verification. Some 15 million job cards were cancelled on the grounds that they were bogus.

Did mandatory Aadhaar integration at least reduce payment delays? Possibly not. As the last, bitter joke in that saga, a recent study argued that ABPS implementation had no significant effect on payment delays at all.

The fundamental promise of Aadhaar was that it would expand access – make it easier for people to access things, not harder. Let more people in, not keep them out. If it’s done the opposite, as the government’s own data suggests, then something has gone very badly wrong.

Why has all of this happened?

Seeing like an (Indian) State

James C. Scott was declared dead, but he isn’t leading any protest marches over it. The Yale University professor, one of the most fascinating characters in American academia, died last July. Scott was well known for his theories of the modern state and the way it interacts with and shapes the structures of people’s lives, with his arguments best summed up in the book Seeing Like a State. I highly recommend the book to essentially everyone, but a particular part of his thesis is relevant to our discussion here.

Basically, Scott believed that modern states have the urge to make things modern, rational, and above all legible; they want to use scientific principles, categories, and databases to turn the chaos of human life into order, a particular kind of order that makes society easy to govern and administer. Ideally, of course, the systems they create – ID numbers, legal documents, and so on – will make life more convenient for the people on the ground. In practice, though, these systems will often be designed to be convenient for the government – which is not always the same as making things easy for the people actually using these systems.

That’s how you get the living dead of India, and poor Baburam Bhil: a situation in which it’s much more convenient for the state to deny reality than for it to provide any form of redress to the individual. A state is not always interested in making what’s on paper conform to what’s real – it’s always more convenient to deny any reality that doesn’t match what’s on paper.

Now think about all these Aadhaar-linked systems from the perspective of the Indian state: they seem great! A computer can easily compare names and details and flag mismatches; biometric authentication will add another layer of security; cash transfers will be automatically initiated to the correct Aadhaar-linked bank accounts; the colossal fraud in India’s public welfare systems can finally be fought with the power of modern technology! From the state’s point of view, making everyone jump through these multiple hoops makes perfect sense. The system that all this mandatory integration creates will, ideally, function like a well-oiled automated machine. No adjustment required, no messy human involvement needed. It’s logical, it’s rational, it’s orderly – it’s good for everyone!

Now look at it from the perspective of someone actually using these systems. You know your name isn’t always going to match exactly across documents – an overworked clerk will mistype something, or a handwritten form will be inaccurately digitized. Maybe one document required a middle name, but another didn’t, and now there’s a discrepancy. And you know your fingerprints aren’t always going to be clear on a scanner, that the scanner itself won’t be in good working order, that the erratic Internet connection in your region can and will fail at the worst possible moments. You know all this, and from your point of view, the new system is a terrible idea because – a large chunk of the time – it will fail.

That’s the reality of India, a country of a billion people. It’s messy, indistinct, illegible. A system that attempted to force that reality into a neat, ‘rationalized’ pattern was always going to exclude large parts of the population. Every system makes tradeoffs – but a tradeoff that leaves a third or a quarter of people out of the system cannot and should not be acceptable.

The Aadhaar system was built to aid inclusion. By accepting these mass exclusions, it is undermining its own admirable intentions and hurting millions of people who’ve done nothing wrong.

And it doesn’t stop there.

Aadhaar Woes

The Indian state of Bihar is due to hold elections for the state legislature in a few months. Like every Indian election, it will be a grand exercise. Some 70 million voters are eligible to cast ballots, a number exceeding the total population of the UK. This has concerned the government, which believes there to be a significant number of people on that voter roll who shouldn’t be there – some deceased, some no longer resident in the state, some who are not even from India but may have acquired fradulent documentation. Not long ago, it announced a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of Bihar’s voter rolls. Voters in Bihar who was not on the list as of the year 2003 must now prove that they deserve to be allowed to vote.

There are 11 documents that can be used to prove this. Aadhaar is not one of them. Nor, indeed, is a driver’s license or a taxpayer PAN card, which generally work for official purposes in other contexts. Some 30 million people must now present proof or be taken off the rolls. They were given one month to present a document on the list and have it verified by their local Booth-Level Officer, most of whom already work full-time jobs, and each of whom is now responsible for verifying hundreds of people’s documents and ‘enumeration’ forms.

This is hardly the first time the Indian state has made it clear that Aadhaar offers no protection. In recent weeks, a number of Indian citizens from the state of Bengal working in other states have been picked up by the police, transferred to the custody of the Border Security Force, and physically expelled across the border to Bangladesh. The justification for doing so was that they were suspected to be undocumented migrants from that country. Most of these people had valid Aadhaar cards (among other documents); the police largely refused to even try to verify them.

One might well ask: if Aadhaar won’t protect people’s basic citizenship rights – including the right not to be exiled without due process – what is it good for?

One More Paper on the Pile

Aadhaar has immense potential, whether it’s to replace the pile of ID documents one needs to get anything done in India, or simply to add a new, more convenient way of proving identity for official purposes. That being said, the current trends in implementation have undermined that goal immensely:

• Aadhaar is not sufficient for accessing core social welfare entitlements; ‘seeding’ and biometric authentication requirements have eroded the key promises behind the Aadhaar idea
  

• Aadhaar is, increasingly, not applicable when it comes to asserting civic rights; it won’t secure you a place on a voter roll, or even prevent your unlawful deportation from your own country

Some proponents of the system cite the Indian Supreme Court’s 2018 judgment in the Puttaswamy case, which challenged the Aadhaar Act that gives the system legal force, as forcing the inclusion of other identity documentation along with Aadhaar. At the same time, the government has continued efforts to make Aadhaar mandatory for a range of functions, such as Employee Provident Fund services, and to amend the rules in ways that are arguably in contravention of the Supreme Court’s decision.

It’s a strange contradiction: the Indian state continues to push for mandatory Aadhaar integration in a number of different systems, yet when it matters most. Aadhaar simply isn’t any protection at all. It is, officially, not proof of citizenship, residency, address, or even age.

In effect, we’re seeing the creation of a paradigm in which Aadhaar is required for everything, but is proof of nothing.

Taken to its logical conclusion, we’ll have a system in which, rather than replace the existing jumble of ID documents, Aadhaar simply adds one more to the substantial pile of photocopies you’ll need to submit to get anything done in this country.

Surely we can do better than this.

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