Digital India

Aadhaar

Aadhaar, India's biometric digital identity system, underpins most digital India services; as of 2025, it covers an estimated 99.9% of India's adult population, with over 1.39 billion identities issued. Aadhaar-based e-KYC (electronic "know your customer") is extensively used across banking, telecom, financial services, and welfare schemes.^[10]

Unified payment interface

While formally the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is an initiative of the Reserve Bank of India and the National Payments Corporation of India rather than a Digital India project, it is part of the larger digital public infrastructure push. UPI processes over 100 billion transactions annually and has been adopted in several other countries.

DigiLocker

DigiLocker allows citizens to store and share government-issued documents digitally using Aadhaar-based authentication. The platform's website claims that it has OVER 73.5 crore registered users (27+ crore active users), and over 900 crore issued documents. As of August 2026, 2,885 government agencies are registered with DigiLocker as document issuers, and 4,313 government and private agencies as document requesters (the government allows several classes of businesses to request documents for specific purposes, such as banks and financial institutions for credit assessments and identity confirmation).^[11]

Education and training

In 2017, the government approved an outlay of ₹2,351.38 crore (equivalent to ₹33 billion or US$340 million in 2023) for Pradhan Mantri Gramin Digital Saksharta Abhiyan (Prime Minister Rural Digital Literacy Mission), aiming to make 6 crore rural households digitally literate by March 2020.^[12][13][14]

Other initiatives

UMANG is a multi-platform, multi-lingual app for accessing over 1,200 central and state government services.^[15] In the 2016 Union budget, the government announced several technology initiatives to prevent tax evasion.^[16]

Andhra Pradesh

In 2014, Chandrababu Naidu-led government held its first cabinet meeting through an app.^[17] The state has launched E-Pragati, a digital framework that provides 750 services from 34 departments through a single platform.^[18] In 2018, the government launched Bhudhaar, a project to assign an 11-digit identifier to each land parcel across the state. Other initiatives include e-Panta, an Android-based app to collect crop-related information, and a portal that lets financial institutions verify whether another loan has been issued against a land parcel.^[19][20]

Criticism and challenges

Scholars have challenged technological determinism, the notion that digital tools alone can resolve entrenched social and governance issues. Instead, governments must tailor solutions to their nation's specific political and social context.^[22] Others note that technology amplifies underlying institutional forces, so technology must be accompanied by significant changes in policy and institutions to have a meaningful impact.^[23][24] The benefits of the initiative have also accrued unevenly. The ORF study noted that tele-density stood at about 59% against 131% in urban areas, and less than half of rural women owned a mobile phone compared to 80.7% for rural men.^[10]

The extension of the programme to state-run commercial platforms, including the Open Network for Digital Commerce, has drawn criticism for the government intervening in the market as both a referee and a player without a specific need to address a public-goods rationale.^[25] Data security and privacy have been recurring concerns. The Comptroller and Auditor General of India flagged multiple issues with Aadhaar, including data matching, authentication errors, and shortfall in achieving targets.^[26] The New York-based Software Freedom Law Center has questioned the expansion of Aadhaar-based authentication for many services without addressing critical gaps in India's data-protection framework.^[27] The programme has also been criticised for bias towards Reliance Industries, with allegations that telecom regulations were amended to favour the company.^[28]