India plans to take Aadhaar abroad for its diaspora
The identity authority wants non-resident Indians and overseas citizens to enrol and authenticate without a trip home. The details are not yet public.
The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), which runs the Aadhaar identity system, plans to make Aadhaar accessible to Indians living abroad. Its chief executive, Saurabh Vijay, announced the plans at the Global Fintech Fest in Mumbai, saying the authority is working on policy and legal changes and that proof-of-concept projects are under way.
How overseas enrolment or authentication would work has not been set out. Today non-resident Indians can enrol without meeting the usual 182-day residency rule if they hold a valid Indian passport, but they must visit an Aadhaar centre in India to give their fingerprints and iris scans. Overseas Citizens of India generally need to have lived in India for 182 days in the previous year.
Access from abroad would remove a common friction for the diaspora: proving who they are for banking, investment and property transactions at home.
Wider use at home
The overseas plan comes as Aadhaar spreads further into domestic services. At its Aadhaar Samvaad event in Kolkata, UIDAI launched five initiatives, including face authentication for ration shops, a lighter framework for small organisations that verify identity and a new token management system, which IQGov [covered last week](/article/aadhaar-samvaad-kolkata/). Biometric authentication also became mandatory for households receiving the cooking-gas subsidy from 1 October.
Officials are also working on more ways to authenticate and on an "Aadhaar Lite" product to strengthen electronic know-your-customer checks.
The move fits India's broader effort to take its digital public infrastructure beyond its borders. The UPI payments network already works in several countries, and the government increasingly promotes Indian systems and expertise abroad. Extending Aadhaar to citizens overseas would be a smaller step, but a telling one: identity infrastructure following its people rather than staying inside a territory.
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