Strategika
February 20, 2025
One of the architects of India’s digital identity has told Sri Lanka’s DPI Summit that digital public infrastructure allows governments to track individual finances and vaccine passports.
In his keynote address at Sri Lanka’s DPI Summit on Wednesday, Aadhaar Founder and CTO Srikanth Nadhamuni touted India’s “DigiLocker” as an example for other nations to follow.
DPI consists of three elements:
Digital identity
Fast payment systems
Massive data exchange
In India, records and credentials are now stored in a digital locker.
With DigiLocker, “5.2 billion records have been digitally verified in India. One hundred and fifty million people are using these lockers,” Nadhamuni said, listing the different types of records that were stored in these digital lockers.
These documents and credentials included digital ID cards, school records, caste certificates, and vaccination passports, the latter of which Nadhamuni said were “extremely important”:
COVID-19: India did some 2 billion COVID-19 vaccinations, and you had to just carry your digital certificate to the plane. Often, they would look at your QR code and say you're good, but if they actually verified it, they would see that it's been signed by the government of Indian. It can't be a fake certificate. This is very important.There has never been any scientific basis for issuing or requiring vaccine passports like the ones that the founder of Aadhaar boasted about.
In fact, the World Health Organization (WHO) even warned in August 2021 that vaccine passports “may increase the risk of spreading disease” because “the extent to which each vaccine prevents transmission of SARS-CoV-2 to susceptible individuals remains to be evaluated.”
Tracking Every Individual’s Financial Activities
So what else is a DPI DigiLocker good for?
According to Nadhamuni, requiring citizens to link their digital identities to tax authorities “has allowed the government to better track individuals’ financial activities.”
Tracking an individual’s financial activities is supposed to reduce tax evasion, which has been a historical problem in India, but it also means the government knows everything about your buying, selling, and saving habits.
With a central bank digital currency (CBDC) called the e-rupee or digital rupee on the way in India, the government would theoretically be able to automatically tax a citizen by seizing money directly from their digital wallet, in addition to other programmable features, such as setting expiration dates on the CBDC itself.
The mandatory linking of Aadhaar [digital ID system] and PAN [income tax system] has allowed the government to better track individuals’ financial activities, according to Srikanth Nadhamuni, who spoke at the Sri Lanka DPI Summit in February 2025
For Nadhamuni, equality of access is a key feature of DPI, and by that he means that you don’t need to be literate to participate in the system thanks to advances in generative AI.
““Today, with Generative AI […] it’s quite amazing what they
can do. An illiterate person who might find it difficult to do banking
can do banking by talking to a conversational interface,” said the Aadhaar CTO.
“A poor person from a village can talk to the government
through conversational interfaces and ask questions and see what kinds
of benefits they can avail,” he added.
What’s more important than teaching people to read? Enabling illiterate people to interact with banks through AI chatbots!
It’s an example of what World Economic Forum (WEF) founder Klaus Schwab calls “the intelligent age,” where machines are getting smarter and humans are getting dumber.
“The Intelligent Age is fundamentally altering how we communicate — both with one another and with the world around us,” Schwab wrote in a blog post last year.
“AI-driven platforms are already beginning to mediate much of our
communication, whether through social media algorithms that decide what
content we see or virtual assistants who manage our schedules and
interactions,” he added.
Translation services and conversational interfaces for the illiterate can be very useful tools, but at the same time, they do not encourage illiterate people to become literate.
Nadhumani’s remarks at the Sri Lanka DPI Summit echo those of another Aadhaar architect, Nandan Nilekani, who told the B20 India Summit 2023 that India’s DPI app was ideal for vaccine passports, tax collection, automated toll payments, climate adaptation and circular economy.
Nilekani had previously told the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that the “tools of the new world” required everyone to have a digital ID, a smartphone and a bank account, and everything else was built on top of that.
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