Thank you dear subscribers, we are overwhelmed with your response.
Your Turn is a unique section from ThePrint featuring points of view from its subscribers. If you are a subscriber, have a point of view, please send it to us. If not, do subscribe here: https://theprint.in/subscribe/
Both India and the United States have built sophisticated systems to verify who crosses their borders. India runs the world’s largest biometric identity database. The United States operates one of the most exhaustive immigration vetting infrastructures on the planet. Yet for all their individual sophistication, these two systems do not communicate digitally at all for routine vetting — and that silence has consequences for immigrants, policymakers, and national security on both sides.
As someone who has lived inside both systems, I want to make a specific argument: India and the United States each have something the other lacks, and a structured bilateral information-sharing framework would strengthen both countries’ immigration processing — not by building walls, but by building bridges between existing infrastructure that already works.
What India Has Built
India’s Aadhaar system is remarkable in scale. With over 1.4 billion enrollees, it is the largest biometric identity database in the world, capturing fingerprints, iris scans, and facial data linked to a unique twelve-digit identifier. Alongside it, the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems — CCTNS — connects all 17,798 police stations across India’s 36 States and Union Territories, achieving 100% coverage and digitising FIRs, arrest records, and criminal histories into a centralised database. The Passport Seva system, which processes over thirteen million passports annually, links directly to both Aadhaar and police verification.
What India has, in other words, is deep domestic identity infrastructure. What it lacks is a robust mechanism for sharing that data with foreign governments processing visa applications from Indian nationals — even when those governments specifically request it.
What the United States Has Built
The United States screens visa applicants through multiple overlapping systems: the IDENT biometric database, FBI criminal history checks, the National Counterterrorism Center watchlist, and the interagency TECS system that flags individuals at ports of entry. Legal immigrants undergo years of background checks, financial disclosures, and in-person interviews before receiving status.
What the United States has is thorough verification — but only for the information it can access. When an applicant arrives from a country whose domestic criminal records are not electronically accessible to US authorities, the vetting process relies on whatever that country chooses to share through diplomatic channels. That process is slow, inconsistent, and frequently incomplete.
Where the Gap Lives
The gap is not in either country’s domestic systems. It is in the space between them.
India has the biometric infrastructure to verify identity at a granular level. The United States has the legal and institutional framework to act on verified information. But there is no real-time, standardised protocol for the two to exchange this data when processing visa applications, asylum claims, or background investigations involving Indian nationals.
The existing Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty between India and the United States — ratified in 2005 — provides a framework for sharing evidence in criminal investigations. But it was designed for prosecutorial cooperation after crimes have occurred, not preventive screening before immigration decisions are made. The MLAT moves at the speed of traditional bureaucracy; modern migration moves at the speed of global aviation.
A Model Worth Building
It is worth distinguishing between two separate goals that a bilateral framework could serve, because conflating them weakens the case for both.
The first is efficiency for legal travelers. India is among the largest sources of H-1B, L-1, and student visa applicants to the United States. Background checks for these categories can take months — not because the applicants are suspicious, but because US authorities cannot query Indian criminal databases directly and must rely on paper-based diplomatic requests. A streamlined verification protocol would allow USCIS to resolve these cases faster, freeing investigative resources for cases where data is genuinely missing or flagged.
The second is security enforcement — specifically, the ability to verify asylum claimants and individuals whose backgrounds are otherwise opaque to US authorities. This is a narrower, higher-stakes use case that requires more careful design.
Crucially, critics of such a framework will immediately raise concerns about data privacy and sovereignty — and they are right to. A bilateral bridge between Aadhaar and US immigration systems must not become a wide-open backdoor into either country’s databases. The answer is not to abandon the idea but to architect it correctly. India’s UIDAI has already built query-based authentication into Aadhaar’s domestic infrastructure: a requesting party submits a biometric, and the system returns a match confirmation — not a data file, not a profile dump. The principle is the same one that undergirds the most successful international model for exactly this kind of cooperation.
The European Union’s Prüm framework — upgraded under Prüm II regulations — demonstrates exactly how this can work in practice. Under Prüm, member states do not browse each other’s full criminal databases. An automated query returns only a “hit” or “no hit.” If a hit is confirmed, a human forensic expert must independently verify the match before any identity details change hands, and the requesting state must then pursue the underlying dossier through established judicial cooperation channels. Raw data never transfers automatically. Personal information never flows without human oversight and formal legal process.
This is the model worth building between India and the United States — not the comprehensive, integrated intelligence sharing of alliances like Five Eyes, which is designed for a different purpose entirely, but a targeted, automated query system with strict procedural guardrails. Prüm has operated across dozens of sovereign states with different legal systems and privacy frameworks. An India-US bilateral version is architecturally feasible; what it requires is political will, not technological invention.
What Both Countries Gain
The United States gains the ability to verify the backgrounds of applicants from India — one of the largest sources of both legal immigration and visa overstays — with greater accuracy and speed. For India, the benefits go beyond the reciprocal ability to track nationals abroad with outstanding warrants. A functioning, trusted verification protocol between the two countries would put India in a stronger position to be considered for advanced US travel programs — including expanded Global Entry access, or a longer-term roadmap toward visa waiver arrangements. That would be a significant diplomatic and economic win for New Delhi, reducing friction for Indian business travellers, students, and professionals at a scale that no bilateral statement of intent has yet achieved.
More broadly, both countries gain what every functional immigration system requires: the confidence that the people entering are who they say they are.
I have watched the current system from the inside — as a dependent immigrant whose legal family was scrutinised at every step while gaps elsewhere went unaddressed. The solution is not more suspicion. It is better infrastructure. India and the United States already have the pieces. The question is whether they are willing to build the bridge between them.
These pieces are being published as they have been received – they have not been edited/fact-checked by ThePrint.