French President Emmanuel Macron and former British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak praise India for its digital identity and health ID schemes.
Giving a keynote address at the India AI Impact Summit on Thursday, Macron applauded the Indian government for its Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), which includes the Aadhaar digital ID, the Universal Payments Interface (UPI) fast payments system, and the Ayushman Bharat digital health ID.
“India built something that no other country in the world has built – a digital identity for 1.4 billion people, a payments system that now processes 20 billion transactions every month, a health infrastructure that has issued 500 million digital health IDs”
Emmanuel Macron, India AI Impact Summit, February 2026
Dubbed the “India Stack” DPI is made up of three main components: digital identity, fast payments systems, and massive data sharing between public and private entities.
Sunak, for his keynote, said, “The India Stack has shown people how technology can benefit them in their everyday lives.”
“This Digital Public Infrastructure: Aadhaar, UPI, and now Ayushman Bharat health accounts provide universal, digitally verified foundations on which AI applications can now reach 1.4 billion people”
Rishi Sunak, India AI Impact Summit, February 2026
India Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission on August 15, 2020, five months after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared that COVID-19 had reached pandemic status.
About a year later, the Ayushman Bharat Digital Health ID Card was launched to store the health data and medical records for every citizen who applied.
It was almost immediately used as a vaccine passport.
Speaking at the Sri Lanka DPI Summit last year, Aadhaar founder CTO Srikanth Nadhamuni said that digital health ID cards were important to prove vaccination status before traveling.
“COVID-19, India did some two billion COVID vaccinations, and you had to just carry your digital certificate to the plane. Often they’d look at your QR code and say you’re good, but if they actually verified it, they’d see that it had been signed by the government of India. It can’t be a fake certificate. Super important”
Srikanth Nadhamuni, Sri Lanka DPI Summit, February 2025
Two years prior to Nadhamuni’s presentation, Infosys co-founder and key Aadhaar architect Nandan Nilekani, told the B20 India Summit 2023 how important vaccine passports were.
“When vaccination had to happen, the government built a COVID platform, which allowed India to have 2.5 billion vaccinations in two years […] You got a vaccination certificate in real-time, and you could show it anywhere you went in India or abroad […] Digital technology and DPI have been fundamental to India’s development”
Nandan Nilekani, B20 India Summit, August 2023
Meanwhile, the COVID-19 “vaccines” from Pfizer were never tested for transmissibility, and the World Health Organization (WHO) even warned in August 2021 that vaccines passports “may increase the risk of disease spread” because “the extent to which each vaccine prevents transmission of SARS-CoV-2 to susceptible individuals remains to be assessed.”
A person who was fully vaccinated and boosted to the max was just as likely to spread COVID as the person who didn’t receive a single jab.
Here we are, years after knowing that vaccine passports did nothing to prevent transmission, but instead made second-class citizens out of those who opted out, and world leaders are still praising their rollouts at the India AI Impact Summit.
Image Source: Screenshots of Emmanuel Macron and Rishi Sunak speaking separately at the India AI Impact Summit, February 19, 2026
