India's Aadhaar program, the world's largest biometric ID system was launched in 2009 with grand promises of streamlining welfare and providing every resident a unique identity number. Over 1.3 billion Aadhaar IDs have been issued. The government justified the massive effort as essential infrastructure for the digital economy and direct benefit transfers.
Between 2009 and 2018, roughly ₹9,000-10,000 crore of public funds were spent to enroll the population. For context, tech entrepreneur Sabeer Bhatia famously calculated that the entire Aadhaar system cost about $1.3 billion (≈₹10,000 crore), an amount he argued was "money ill spent," claiming a similar system could be built for just $20 million. Critics have long questioned whether such huge expenditure was warranted, especially given Aadhaar's legally limited utility.
Aadhaar was sold as a universal ID, yet it is not a proof of citizenship or domicile under Indian law. The Aadhaar Act's Section 9 explicitly states an Aadhaar number "shall not, by itself, confer any right of, or be proof of, citizenship or domicile". The Supreme Court has repeatedly reaffirmed this constraint, most recently in September 2025, a bench underscored "we cannot enhance the status of Aadhaar beyond what is ascribed to it by the Aadhaar Act".
In plain terms, you cannot vote with Aadhaar, cannot use it as a passport substitute, and it does not replace the PAN card for taxes. It's primarily an ID for accessing government subsidies or verifying identity for services, but not a standalone official ID for critical rights. This begs the question that "why did India invest so heavily in a program that, by design, cannot serve as a definitive ID?"
Supporters argue Aadhaar has value in reducing duplication and ghost beneficiaries in welfare schemes and enabling easier KYC for banks or SIM cards. Indeed, Aadhaar-based authentication is used billions of times for routine verification. But detractors point out that Pan cards still handle taxation, voter ID cards handle elections, passports handle travel; Aadhaar was essentially an additional ID. Many called it an expensive redundancy or "expensive misstep". By 2018, the Supreme Court even struck down efforts to mandate Aadhaar for private services (like bank accounts or cell phones) on privacy grounds. In effect, Aadhaar's scope was curtailed to voluntary use for welfare and some government services, not the all-encompassing ID the architects envisioned.
Worse, the Aadhaar project's execution was marred by serious flaws and breaches. Far from being foolproof, it saw numerous fake enrollments and data leaks. In one notorious case, an Aadhaar card was issued to the Hindu god "Hanuman ji" in 2014, which is complete with the deity's photo and listing a mythological father's name. A few years later, an operator in Madhya Pradesh enrolled his pet dog "Tommy Singh" with an Aadhaar number, linking the dog to a gas connection; the man was arrested for the prank.
There have been reports of Aadhaar cards for monkeys, fake names, even foreigners. For example, police nabbed a Chinese national and a Pakistani spy who had managed to obtain Aadhaar cards while operating in India. Such incidents puncture the government's claims of rigorous verification. If biometric and document checks were so robust, how did dogs and deities get Aadhaar? Critics say this reflects the reality that enrollment was often subcontracted out to private agencies under pressure to meet targets, leading to corner-cutting and fraud.
Even more alarming have been data security lapses. In January 2018, investigative journalists from The Tribune uncovered that they could buy administrator access to the Aadhaar database for just ₹500 via a WhatsApp group, gaining entry to personal data of over a billion citizens. Around the same time, it emerged that over 200 government websites had accidentally published confidential Aadhaar details (names, addresses, etc.) of beneficiaries online. Massive breaches like these prompted public outrage.
The UIDAI (Unique ID Authority of India) downplayed the incidents, insisting the core biometric data remained safe. But the damage was done. Aadhaar's credibility took a hit, with many questioning why thousands of crores were spent on a system that couldn't guarantee basic data security. "It's like spending ₹500 crore to build a palace, and in the first rain the roof leaks," an expensive structure built with apparent poor quality control.
Citizens waiting at an Aadhaar Seva Kendra (enrollment and update center). These centers are meant to provide one-stop service for Aadhaar enrolment and changes.
By 2025, despite the controversies, the government doubled down on Aadhaar infrastructure. The Unique Identification Authority of India decided to establish Aadhaar Seva Kendras (ASKs) in every district, which are dedicated centers for Aadhaar enrolment and updates, operating on a model similar to Passport Seva Kendras. In August 2025, a work order was awarded to BLS International Services Ltd. for ₹2,055.35 crore to set up and run these centers across all districts. BLS International, a Delhi-based company, is now responsible for establishing hundreds of ASKs and managing their operations for a period of six years under UIDAI supervision.
Who is BLS International? It's not a small startup but a two-decade-old global outsourcing firm, known primarily for handling visa application centers for various governments. Founded in 2005 by Diwakar Aggarwal (now Chairman) with his son Shikhar Aggarwal as Joint MD, BLS is publicly listed and has a footprint in dozens of countries. The company processes millions of visa and consular service applications through over 27,000 centers worldwide (some sources claim even 50,000) and 20,000+ staff.
For instance, since 2016 BLS has run visa services for the government of Spain, among other contracts. In short, BLS is an established player in managing citizen-facing service centers at scale. Recently, sensing opportunity in India's digital governance push, BLS launched a subsidiary "BLS E-Services" to focus on domestic government-to-citizen services, even raising funds via an IPO in 2024. The Aadhaar Seva Kendra contract was a coveted prize aligning with this strategic expansion.
According to the contract, BLS must set up district-level ASKs as one-stop shops for all Aadhaar services which include new enrollments, biometric updates, demographic corrections, etc., both for appointment-based and walk-in clients. Each center will have the equipment and staff to process Aadhaar applications under UIDAI's "close supervision". The scope is nationwide, effectively creating a branded network of Aadhaar hubs in every district.
This is a scale-up from the earlier approach where Aadhaar updates were available at scattered locations like post offices, bank branches, or state government facilities. Notably, UIDAI had already piloted 21 Aadhaar Seva Kendras in select cities from 2019-2020 as a first phase (eventually planning 114 centers in major cities). Those pilot centers were directly operated under UIDAI's guidance. The 2025 initiative with BLS massively extends the concept to over 700 districts through a public-private partnership.
BLS International won the ASK contract via a tender process, and the company has asserted that everything was above board. In stock exchange filings, BLS explicitly stated that "the project does not involve any interest from the promoter group in the entity that awarded the order nor does it fall within related party transactions." In other words, BLS officially assures that its owners had no stake or undisclosed connection with UIDAI or the government officials who granted the contract. This is effectively a claim that no favoritism or conflict of interest influenced the award. If evidence emerged to the contrary, it would mean BLS misled regulators, so the company has taken pains to emphasize the legitimacy of the deal.
On paper, BLS was a qualified bidder, as it is a reputable firm with global credentials in managing ID and visa centers, presumably the lowest bidder in the tender. The contract, valued at ₹2,055 crore (about $250 million), is sizable but not outrageous for establishing a nationwide network over six years. BLS will bear end-to-end responsibility for the centers' operation, maintenance, and customer service, while UIDAI oversees performance. For BLS, this deal is a big win, indeed the company's stock price jumped ~4% on the news. It cements BLS's position in India's e-governance space.
Yet almost immediately, skepticism arose in media and public discourse. Why? Because to many, this move looked like throwing good money after bad. Aadhaar's core utility is in doubt (by court rulings), its initial rollout was riddled with leaks and fake entries, and now another ₹2,000+ crore of taxpayers' money is being poured in to enhance its infrastructure. The phrase "Aadhaar Seva Kendra scam" began circulating on minds of many with users questioning the necessity and motive of this contract. Was this genuinely to improve citizen convenience, or, as cynics suspect, just the latest conduit to siphon public funds under the guise of a project?
To truly understand why many smell a "scam" in the BLS-Aadhaar episode, one must look at the broader pattern of public procurement in India. Understand with this example that a road that should cost ₹1 lakh to build gets tendered out for ₹10 lakhs; the contractor and officials/politicians then split the ₹9 lakh windfall, while only ₹1 lakh worth of work gets done. Unfortunately, this is not a far-fetched hypothetical. Numerous audits by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) and investigative reports have found instances of over-invoicing and collusion in government contracts across sectors (infrastructure, defense, IT, you name it).
A stark contemporary mechanism enabling such quid-pro-quo is the electoral funding system. In recent years, big businesses have been donating enormous sums to political parties via electoral bonds, which is an opaque system that until recently hid donor identities. Investigations following a Supreme Court-mandated disclosure in 2024 revealed a disturbing trend where "There are companies who have gotten large government contracts, and either before or after the deal, they have given funds to the ruling parties, indicating a quid-pro-quo."
According to data analysis, the top corporate donors via bonds (spanning sectors like pharma, construction, etc.) were all under investigation by agencies yet donated generously to the ruling party, and many won lucrative government deals or saw probes against them slow down. The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was the biggest beneficiary, receiving about ₹60 billion (₹6000 crore) in anonymous bond donations over 2018-2023, far more than all opposition parties combined.
While BJP officials deny any wrongdoing, transparency activists describe the electoral bond as "legalized corruption" where effectively bribes get in exchange for contracts or leniency, laundered through bonds. We do know that public money has been shamelessly misused under plausible covers before. A darkly comic example often cited is the so-called "tea scam" in Maharashtra. RTI queries revealed that the Chief Minister's office under Devendra Fadnavis (BJP) saw its annual expenses on tea and snacks skyrocket by 577% in two years, from ₹58 lakhs in 2015-16 to ₹3.34 crore in 2017-18.
This translated to an absurd statistic where an average of 18,500 cups of tea served per day at the CMO, implying either a lot of extremely thirsty visitors or, as the opposition alleged, a lot of fake billing. The CMO later clarified the bills included various meeting expenses across offices, but the incident reinforced how easily routine expenditures can be inflated to siphon funds. When people hear "₹3.4 crore spent on chai," it rightly raises eyebrows, much like hearing "₹2055 crore to upgrade Aadhaar centers" does.
In the technology arena too, the government routinely outsources projects at high cost while its own in-house capabilities languish. The National Informatics Centre (NIC), the government's IT backbone, has 3,500 employees and an annual budget of about ₹1150 crore. NIC maintains many existing government websites and servers. Logically, NIC could have been mobilized to develop the Aadhaar infrastructure or the new citizen service centers.
Instead, UIDAI contracted private IT firms (HCL, Wipro, Accenture, others) for technical systems and now BLS for physical centers. This multiplicity of vendors can enable a blame game (each pointing fingers when things fail) and makes oversight harder. It also prompts the question that if we invest in agencies like NIC, why are we paying outsiders again?
In the Aadhaar case, it appears one project was split among multiple vendors over time; example, HCL built the core, then UIDAI/NIC managed it, then Infosys or others built portals, now BLS handles centers, with money flowing at each juncture. Critics see this as fragmentation that conceals the true total cost (which some studies pegged at as high as ₹60,000+ crore if all integration costs are counted). The end result is that no single entity is accountable for Aadhaar's overall performance, and each contractor's focus is on maximizing their slice of the pie.
All these institutional factors create fertile ground for a scam without a smoking gun. It's the systemic, slow bleed of public funds through inflated invoices, rather than one dramatic act of fraud. But it's important to follow the money. Will BLS actually spend ₹2055 crore in setting up and operating the centers with full integrity? Or will a significant portion of that end up as profit that could hint at over-budgeting?
The BLS-Aadhaar Seva Kendra saga is a microcosm of the larger debate on governance in India. On one hand, it's framed as a public service improvement, bringing Aadhaar updates to every district, potentially benefitting millions who need to keep their ID details up to date.
On the other hand, the way it's being executed raises familiar alarm bells where a large contract to a private firm with political connections not entirely ruled out, significant taxpayer money at stake despite user fees already funding the service, and the expansion of a project that the highest court in the land has clipped the wings of. It has all the ingredients of what the public cynically calls a "scam", even if no one is ever legally prosecuted for it.
To label something a scam is serious. Is the BLS Aadhaar project a scam? Technically, it might be legal where a tender was floated and a capable company won it. But ethically and systemically, it exhibits the signs of the state extracting funds from the public treasury for objectives that are not clearly justified.
Its like "if you couldn't save the patient with a ₹80,000 crore surgery, why spend another ₹2,000 crore decorating the corpse?" The government will of course reject such dark analogies, insisting Aadhaar is very much alive and central to its Digital India vision. Yet the burden of proof is on the authorities to demonstrate that this new investment will tangibly improve public service rather than public loot.
In conclusion, the BLS International Aadhaar center project sits at the intersection of a commendable public service goal and the taint of political-industrial collusion. It exemplifies how a well-intended idea (improving citizen service delivery) can be perceived as a racket due to the context of its implementation.
Whether or not this is a "scam" in the judicial sense, it certainly smells like one to a weary public who have seen too many grand projects yield too little benefit. Only through greater transparency, oversight, and a genuine commitment to value-for-money can the government dispel these suspicions. Until then, the Aadhaar Seva Kendra initiative will remain under a cloud of a case study in how systemic corruption can lurk even within the most high-tech, well-branded schemes of a government.
Ultimately, it will be the relentless questioning by media, civil society, and vigilant citizens that can ensure projects like the Aadhaar Seva Kendras are implemented in the public interest and not as conduits for private enrichment. The Aadhaar saga has been a rollercoaster, from tech marvel to privacy nightmare to welfare tool, and its latest chapter with BLS International will be closely watched. Is it a bold step toward better citizen service, or is it yet another example of the government "looting taxpayers in the name of Digital India"? The evidence, and the outcomes in the coming years, will provide the answer.