In what can be described as absurd, schools have started distributing forms to underage students, at the urging of the Ministry of Education. The intention? Create an automated register of permanent academic accounts (APAAR). For those not in the know, it’s a fancy new 12-digit identifier, much like Aadhaar, but exclusive to students and “designed” to track their academic performance. It includes everything from their marksheets to certificates of all kinds. The intention seems noble: the APAAR will be a one-stop shop for all academic files. This makes it easy for students to change schools, apply for jobs, or join new institutions without the usual mountain of paperwork.

There’s just one problem: India already has Aadhaar to establish a person’s identity and Digilocker is linked to it to store these documents. If these perfectly efficient tools already exist, why create another one? A senior member of the team who worked on the Aadhaar project calls it “ridiculous”.

As these forms are distributed, it is time for parents of minors to start asking themselves, why create an entirely new system for students when there is already a perfectly good one? What is the point of introducing yet another system in an India already teeming with digital identities? The Ministry of Health has its own health ID initiative in the works, and the Ministry of Agriculture is currently developing a farmer ID.

“It’s like a government race to see who can launch the next unique identifier. In an ideal world, a unified ID would simplify things, allowing citizens to move seamlessly between services and ministries. But here we are, creating a jungle of IDs, each a different tree in a forest that is quickly becoming impenetrable,” said a bureaucrat who wished to remain anonymous. His point is that if digital IDs were supposed to make life easier, then at some point that memo was lost.

That aside, there is the cost of the APAAR itself. This initiative is part of the broader Digital India framework and has received considerable funding. ₹14,903 crore for the period 2021-22 to 2025-26. Each new project under this banner, from APAAR to Health ID to Farmer ID, adds to the burden on the taxpayer. APAAR will require new infrastructure, new data privacy protocols, and maintenance, not to mention the funds to keep it secure and accessible.

From an economical and practical point of view, the DigiLocker extension performs the same function and is much simpler. With over 15 million registered users in 2024, DigiLocker has already proven reliable for storing a wide range of personal documents. Launched in 2015, users trust it to store everything from driver’s licenses to vaccination records. It is therefore inevitable that the question of the creation of APAAR as a separate entity arises again.

Rather, instead of making life easier for students, APAAR illustrates the tendency of each department to carve out its own digital domain, even when existing tools serve the same purpose. Aadhaar alone covers over 99% of India’s adult population and DigiLocker’s secure storage capabilities are linked to this. The focus now should be on increasing the number of people using it and making it ubiquitous like UPI.

At its core, the APAAR initiative – and others like it – reflect a well-intentioned but ultimately misguided attempt to innovate in the area of ​​digital identification. Rather than creating a unified, streamlined experience, these separate identifiers build walls within a system that is meant to be open and connected. For citizens already navigating a sea of ​​codes, passwords and identifiers, more digital identification seems like a solution in search of a problem. The government would do well to focus on making life simpler rather than more complicated. After all, no one is asking for an extra 12-digit number to remember.