Interestingly, of these 26 attempts, only one was made using the biometric authentication mode (which has been trumpeted as the flagship feature of Aadhaar by Pandey). This request, from a private sector bank, resulted in failure with error code 330. According to the UIDAI’s website, the description for this error code is “Biometrics locked by Aadhaar holder.”

The irony of the UIDAI CEO locking his own biometrics – which means they cannot be used for Aadhaar authentication – will not be lost on anyone. The petitioners challenging the constitutionality of Aadhaar have raised many concerns about the biometric aspect of Aadhaar, both in terms of its violation of privacy, as well as the risk of exclusion from benefits as a result of biometric mismatch. This risk, they claim, will only increase as more and more biometric details are added to the system and authentication attempts made, since this increases the chance of false positive results during verification.

The UIDAI claims that this isn’t an issue since alternative forms of authentication or verification can be used instead, and that the biometric authentication success rate has been improving for banks (it is 95.1% for 2017 and 2018). Pandey did not attempt to use an alternative mode of authentication for whatever transaction he was attempting to do there, and no other authentication requests were made by that bank.