‘Ruinously expensive’: UIDAI founding DG says EC’s voter-roll exercise needs an Aadhaar-based alternative

The Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls has come under criticism from R S Sharma, former secretary to the Government of India and founding director general of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI). In an editorial published in The Indian Express, Sharma argued that the exercise is not only cumbersome but also “ruinously expensive” and should eventually be replaced by an Aadhaar-based mechanism for voter authentication.

Why is SIR so expensive?

The SIR is aimed at ensuring that electoral rolls are clean and accurate. But Sharma pointed to the scale of the exercise. It involves around 10 lakh public servants, mostly schoolteachers, and costs the exchequer thousands of crores in every cycle. Since the process is periodically repeated, he describes the expense as “ruinously expensive” and argues that the cost is built into the design of the exercise.

His proposed alternative is to use the digital infrastructure that India has already paid for. An Aadhaar-based system, he said, would require a relatively small annual expenditure compared with the recurring cost of the existing process, after a modest one-time investment in building the necessary infrastructure.

Aadhaar is not proof of citizenship

Sharma’s argument rests on a distinction between identity and citizenship. Aadhaar, he noted, establishes identity but is not proof of citizenship. Similarly, voter ID and PAN establish identity or eligibility for particular purposes, but do not independently prove citizenship.

However, he argued that Aadhaar can still play a useful role in electoral authentication. Aadhaar covers a very large proportion of India’s residents and already has mechanisms for de-duplication and authentication. The system could therefore potentially help establish that a person is unique and alive, while other processes would continue to determine whether that person is entitled to vote.

What is the Aadhaar-based proposal?

Sharma specifically suggested that the EC should commission an Aadhaar-EPIC face-authentication application, with UIDAI, as the primary means of revising electoral rolls. Such an approach, he argues, could eliminate the need to spend thousands of crores on a process that repeatedly requires large numbers of officials to verify voters manually.

The proposed mechanism would use face authentication to match a voter with their Aadhaar-linked identity. Sharma argued that this could help detect genuine voters and identify potential duplicates or non-existent records without requiring the same level of door-to-door verification.

Can Aadhaar establish whether a voter is alive?

Sharma also pointed to Aadhaar’s existing use in welfare delivery as evidence that large-scale authentication is technically possible. He cites examples of Aadhaar-enabled transactions and authentication exercises involving pensioners to argue that technology can help establish whether an individual is alive and uniquely identified.

The underlying idea is that if a person can successfully authenticate themselves through Aadhaar, the electoral system would have another technological means of verifying the individual’s existence.

The proposed system would not necessarily mean replacing voter rolls with Aadhaar. Instead, Aadhaar could provide the authentication layer, while citizenship and eligibility to vote would continue to be determined under the electoral system.

The larger argument is that India should stop relying on a largely manual, periodic exercise when it already possesses digital infrastructure capable of supporting a more efficient system. The question, therefore, is whether the country should continue paying thousands of crores for repeated roll revisions or invest in a technology-led alternative.