The Sunday Story | Digital database or coercive report card? APAAR ID

An unsettling development shadows India's education landscape, sharing an uncanny resemblance to my own name. It’s called APAAR — meaning "boundless" or "limitless" in Hindi — ironically apt for a scheme whose appetite for personal data seems boundless. Officially known as the Automated Permanent Academic Account Registry, APAAR is a sweeping initiative under India's National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, promising to track every Indian student's academic trajectory from cradle to career.

In July 2023, the Ministry of Education quietly rolled out APAAR. Without a public consultation and with an obscure letter dispatched to schools nationwide, directing them to start enrolling students into a centralised Aadhaar-linked database. Its ambition is stark: Issue to every student a unique digital identity, authenticated through Aadhaar, creating a longitudinal record, encompassing academic performances and extracurricular achievements. Official jargon touts APAAR as a sophisticated, interoperable registry, integrated seamlessly into existing digital public infrastructure. Practically, however, it's a lifelong electronic dossier accessible to various governmental bodies and even private entities, through open APIs (application programme interfaces), turning every child's academic life into a transparent database entry.

If APAAR resembles Aadhaar’s younger sibling, it's not accidental. Indeed, it explicitly follows Aadhaar’s notorious playbook — launch as voluntary, swiftly becoming indispensable. By October 2023, mere months after its introduction, the Ministry urged all states to expedite enrollment, mandating special parent-teacher meetings solely to facilitate APAAR registrations. Consent forms were distributed, ostensibly securing parental agreement. Yet, these forms offered no genuine choice. Parents found themselves forced into signing away extensive personal information — names, addresses, gender, photographs — for unspecified "educational institutions and recruitment agencies," with no explicit refusal option. By early 2024, the government proudly announced that APAAR IDs exceeded 25 crores — creating one of the world’s largest student databases practically overnight, largely unnoticed by the broader public.

Proponents insist APAAR remains voluntary, reassuring skeptics that no coercion exists. However, ground realities starkly contrast these claims. Schools, driven by imposed targets and timelines, treat APAAR enrollment as non-negotiable. Reports from parents nationwide reveal systemic pressure, often under duress, to comply. The consent forms reflect a classic "consent theatre" — the appearance of voluntary agreement without substantive choice.

Parents, uneasy yet compelled, face an illusionary choice — coerced consent masquerading as autonomy.

Perhaps APAAR’s most disturbing feature is not its invasive data collection, but the clandestine manner of its implementation. Lacking a statutory foundation and a clear legislative basis for its implementation, it emerged quietly from bureaucratic corridors with visions of digital dashboards rather than parliamentary processes.

No detailed public guidelines, implementation frameworks, or privacy policies accompanied the launch of APAAR. 

The government seemingly adopted a reckless “data-first, safeguards-later” strategy, instructing states to enroll millions of children absent legislative oversight or comprehensive debate. APAAR’s rapid deployment embodies governance by fait accompli: collect vast data quickly, leaving citizens scrambling to respond after the fact. Consequently, over 31.5 crore students’ personal data now reside in a central government repository without clear statutory protections. 

Transparency efforts by digital rights advocates, including my organisation, the Internet Freedom Foundation, encountered bureaucratic obstruction reminiscent of Kafka’s narratives. Our Right to Information (RTI) requests — aimed merely at accessing basic authorisation documents — bounced endlessly between government departments and were transferred more than 30 times without meaningful answers.

Eventually, the Ministry hastily uploaded APAAR’s website belatedly, complete with a superficial privacy policy that does not offer any real rights or remedies. For instance, if you look at the privacy policy on the website for APAAR, the fields for the name and designation of a grievance officer remain empty! A document titled, “APAAR Misconception (English)” refers to data security in reference to the “Personal Data Protection Bill”, which was a previously proposed version of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, that was passed through Parliament. This reflects not only a serious lack of care, but also that protections may be afterthoughts.

The Supreme Court’s Puttaswamy judgment (2017) on the fundamental right to privacy looms large over this discussion. That landmark verdict held that Indians have a constitutional right to privacy, and it specifically called out the need for greater protection when it comes to children’s personal data. One would think that after Puttaswamy — and a subsequent 2019 ruling that struck down making Aadhaar compulsory for school enrollment — our policymakers would approach any student data programme with extreme caution, solid legal footing and privacy by design.

Instead, APAAR widens the net of Aadhaar-based tracking in exactly the way the Supreme Court warned the government not to unduly expand Aadhaar’s scope beyond subsidies. Digital public infrastructure is not exempt from basic rights scrutiny. No amount of branding buzzwords can erase the fact that children’s privacy is being compromised on a massive scale, without the guardrails that our highest court, and basic decency, demand.

APAAR is not a solitary aberration; it’s fundamentally aligned with NEP 2020’s broader neoliberal educational philosophy. This policy enthusiastically champions metrics-driven outcomes, digital integration, and data-driven managerialism — selling an alluring vision of modernised, flexible, digitally interconnected education systems. Yet, beneath these laudable aspirations lies a troubling ideological core: a market-driven approach transforming education into quantifiable metrics, positioning students not as young citizens with inherent rights but as human capital, optimisable data points populating vast dashboards.

Inevitably, APAAR’s extensive database will attract commercialisation interests, despite current official silence on private-sector engagement. Its architecture — emphasising interoperability and API-based data sharing — explicitly opens pathways to private ed-tech firms, analytics companies, recruitment agencies, and even advertisers, eager to capitalise on comprehensive student profiles. The prospect of monetising children’s academic data is disturbingly real, threatening privacy erosion and the commodification of childhood.

Proponents say that APAAR will help students build a portfolio of achievements that universities and employers can view at a glance. Indeed, the data fields envisioned go far beyond report cards: Olympiad ranks, sports medals, music certificates — every laurel and admonishment a child ever earns, standardised and catalogued. This is sold as a feature, not a bug: a “holistic” record to recognise diverse talents.

Will this not create even more pressure on kids (and parents) to constantly pad their records, knowing that “everything counts” in an Orwellian permanent record? How will it impact a child’s creativity and freedom to experiment (or even fail) if they know that an official, immutable ledger is recording each stumble and success? We must consider the implications of turning childhood into one continuous, uneditable LinkedIn profile.

In the final calculation, APAAR is a test – not only of our children, but of our democracy. Will we allow an all-seeing digital panopticon to be built around our youngest citizens under the pretext of educational reform? Or will we recall that education’s true purpose is to liberate, not enumerate?

(Apar Gupta is an advocate and founder-director, Internet Freedom Foundation.)