Development of the UIDAI playbook on “Unlocking face authentication”

• Aug 14, 2025
• 2 min

India’s expanding digital public infrastructure has been built around Aadhaar as a foundational ID. While Aadhaar-based fingerprint and iris authentication have enabled widespread access to services, they also face challenges in accuracy, usability, and accessibility, particularly for the elderly, manual laborers, and persons with disabilities. 

Such challenges have created a strong case for alternative and inclusive authentication mechanisms that ensure continuity of access for all without compromising security or consent. In this context, face authentication offers a nonintrusive, contactless, and device-agnostic alternative that can enhance both user convenience and system resilience.

MSC supported the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) to showcase the growing need for face authentication and highlight its role in the ecosystem. We helped the UIDAI develop a strategic playbook titled Unlocking Face Authentication. MSC conducted extensive stakeholder consultations across sectors, engaging with the UIDAI, banks, financial institutions, telecom companies, government agencies, and technology service providers, to shape the insights and recommendations for the playbook. We also mapped end-to-end workflows to integrate Aadhaar-based face authentication into existing service delivery models across key domains, such as financial services, telecom, governance, and social protection.

We captured sector-specific challenges and enablers, developed process integration blueprints, and identified high-impact use cases where face authentication could improve user experience, particularly for the elderly, differently-abled, and digitally underserved populations. 

This engagement reflected MSC’s deep expertise in digital ID systems, inclusive service design, and public infrastructure enablement, and our capacity to translate complex technology into inclusive, policy-aligned frameworks that can catalyze real-world impact at scale. The playbook also contributed to positioning face authentication as a scalable and interoperable solution within India’s broader digital identity stack—one that now supports 55 million+ transactions monthly. 

The Gates Foundation commissioned the project.