When the Indian government first launched Aadhaar, it saw an opportunity to harness the country’s burgeoning technology sector to reduce corruption and streamline the delivery of government services. Prior to the advent of Aadhaar, the government has said it was plagued by problems managing its welfare programs, and lost millions of dollars each year as Indian residents either inserted fake names or their own names multiple times into the system in order to withdraw more than their fair share of benefits. With Aadhaar, the practice of accessing benefits became a simple matter of touching a fingerprint scanner. If the fingerprint matches the one on file, the benefit can be approved and administered. When it is working well, the process is comparable to unlocking an iPhone, and ensures that government benefits go only to the people who qualify.

Open to all Indian residents, Aadhaar was optional at first and associated with only a handful of government subsidies, including those for food and liquefied petroleum gas for cooking. It was targeted at those who needed help the most, particularly rural villagers who lacked official forms of identification, and were therefore unable to open bank accounts or access welfare programs in the past.

But over time, mission creep set in. Under the leadership of Nandan Nilekani, the cofounder of the outsourcing firm Infosys (whom Jon Stewart once welcomed as his new overlord on The Daily Show), Aadhaar was used as a way to apply data-driven improvements to a wide range of government and private-sector services. Aadhaar was soon linked to so many activities that it has now become almost impossible to live in India without enrolling. Participation in the program is a requirement, or will be soon, for filing taxes, opening bank accounts, receiving school lunch in the state of Uttar Pradesh, purchasing railway tickets online, accessing some public Wi-Fi, participating in the state of Karnataka’s universal health-care coverage, and benefiting from a wide range of welfare programs. The Indian Member of Parliament Jairam Ramesh has sarcastically described the program as “compulsorily mandatorily voluntary.”

The government authority responsible for administering Aadhaar declined to comment, but in an op-ed for The Indian Express, its CEO, Ajay Bhushan Pandey, wrote that the program has saved the government approximately $8 billion in the past two years alone (the World Bank has estimated that the figure is closer to $1 billion per year). Pandey says that the program has succeeded in improving the government’s capacity for reaching and serving people directly.

For many of the communities Aadhaar was designed to help—particularly the poor and the underserved—the technology hasn’t lived up to the sunny rhetoric, however. In a country with inconsistent internet outside of its large cities, remote towns struggle to get online to authenticate peoples’ fingerprints with the central database. Some enrollees insist that their satellite-internet access works only on cloudy days; others say it functions best when it’s sunny.