On 23 May 2026, the UK Parliament's Home Affairs Committee published Mandatory to manageable: the government's plans for digital ID, and its chair, Dame Karen Bradley, did not reach for diplomatic language. The government's attempt to make digital ID compulsory for right-to-work checks was, she said, "nothing short of a fiasco" — rushed, announced without public consultation, and unable to answer basic questions about privacy and safeguards. It was a remarkable rebuke of a flagship policy. It should also feel familiar to anyone who has followed India's two-decade experiment with Aadhaar, the world's largest biometric ID system. Britain is now learning, in fast-forward, lessons India absorbed slowly and painfully.
The case for digital ID is real — which is why getting it wrong matters
Start with the strongest argument for the people Bradley is criticising. A trustworthy national digital identity is genuinely useful infrastructure. It can cut fraud, let citizens prove eligibility without carrying a folder of documents, and bring people inside the formal economy. India's own Aadhaar-enabled direct benefit transfer architecture has, by the government's accounting, removed duplicate and ghost beneficiaries from welfare rolls and routed payments straight to bank accounts. The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) now operates an ID covering essentially the entire adult population — near-universal saturation that took fifteen years to build. The convenience is not imaginary, and a publication that calls itself pro-innovation should say so plainly.
The problem is never the existence of digital ID. It is coercion without proportionality — and that is precisely what the Home Affairs Committee diagnosed.
India already litigated the question the UK is asking
When Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced in September 2025 that digital ID would become mandatory for proving the right to work, the response was instructive. A parliamentary petition opposing the scheme collected roughly 2.98 million signatures, and polling captured the collapse: More in Common found net public support for digital ID fell from +35 percent in June 2025 to minus 14 percent in the weekend after the announcement. By 14 January 2026 the government had retreated, dropping the mandatory right-to-work requirement and recasting its app as one option among several. The credential survives; the compulsion did not.
India reached the same destination by a different road. The Aadhaar Act of 2016 contained a provision, Section 57, that let private companies — telecoms, banks, fintechs — demand Aadhaar authentication as a condition of service. On 26 September 2018, a five-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court struck it down, holding that mandatory private use of a government identity, justified merely by contract, was a disproportionate intrusion on privacy. The court let Aadhaar stand for targeted welfare and tax functions but severed the limb that turned a voluntary welfare ID into a de facto compulsory login for daily life. That is, almost word for word, the line the UK committee is now drawing: a credential the state may offer, not a checkpoint citizens cannot avoid.
The exclusion problem Britain has not yet had to picture
The Home Affairs Committee worried, in the abstract, about people who could not or would not get a digital ID. India does not have to imagine that population — it can count it. Analysis published by Policy Circle in 2026 estimates that of roughly 312 million Aadhaar biometric authentications attempted each month to access welfare, banking and public services, about 20.3 million fail — a 6.5 percent failure rate that has barely moved in a decade. A fingerprint worn smooth by manual labour, a patchy rural network, an ageing reader at a ration shop: each becomes a wall between a citizen and food they are legally entitled to. When identity verification is mandatory and the fallback is weak, the failure rate is not a technical footnote. It is the mechanism of exclusion, and it lands hardest on the poorest.
This is the argument that pro-innovation policy must internalise rather than wave away. Efficiency gains accrue to the system; authentication failures accrue to individuals who can least absorb them. A proportionate design treats robust manual exceptions, offline fallbacks and a genuine right to opt out as core requirements, not optional extras bolted on after launch.
Proportionality is a design principle, not a brake
The instinctive lesson from both stories is "digital ID is dangerous." That is the wrong lesson, and India's trajectory shows why. The country did not abandon Aadhaar after 2018; it constrained it, and pairs it now with the Digital Personal Data Protection Act of 2023, which — once its rules are fully notified — is meant to give the consent and purpose-limitation guarantees the original scheme lacked. The system became more legitimate by becoming less coercive, not by disappearing.
That is the manageable in the committee's title, and it is the right benchmark for India's next phase as Aadhaar is woven into ever more services. Build the rail; make enrolment and authentication genuinely voluntary where the stakes are private; fund the exception-handling that catches the people the biometrics miss; legislate purpose limits before deployment, not after a petition. Britain has just paid for the announce-first, consult-later model with a roughly 49-point swing in public trust. India paid for it earlier, in court and in ration queues. Neither bill needs to be paid twice.