Indian politicians like to claim that their governance innovations — particularly digital public infrastructure that’s shared between the state and the private sector — are widely admired. They can even point to the occasional testimonial from the leader of another developing nation. 

But last week they bagged an unusual prize: UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer declared that India’s digital “unique ID” system, called Aadhaar, was a “massive success,” and that he hoped to learn from it in rolling out Britain’s equivalent.

Starmer was visiting India and met with Aadhaar’s architect, Nandan Nilekani — who is also the non-executive chairman of the IT services giant Infosys Ltd. He hopefully spent some of that time asking how best to avoid political blowback when the programme inevitably metastasizes into something much larger than planned.      When Aadhaar was first proposed almost two decades ago, it was meant to be strictly voluntary — an additional, light-weight form of identification for those who struggled to access government services. The UK government has promised something similar: The card will only be mandatory for those about to start a new job to prove that they have a legal right to work.