Reimagining India: Unlocking the Potential of Asia’s Next Superpower by McKinsey & Company Inc

Author:McKinsey & Company Inc. [McKinsey & Company Inc.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2013-11-19T05:00:00+00:00

a technology solution for india’s identity crisis

Nandan Nilekani

Nandan Nilekani is chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India and cofounder and former CEO of Infosys.

In rich countries, the emergence of powerful new digital technologies combined with new capacities for creating, organizing, and analyzing vast quantities of data have aroused widespread concerns about privacy and the right of individuals to preserve their anonymity. But for most of the 1.2 billion people who live in India, those are curious preoccupations. Hundreds of millions of Indians born in poverty or outside the nation’s large metropolitan centers have exactly the opposite problem: They cannot prove their formal identity. No official records hold their names, and therefore they can’t prove who they are. Their existence may be a physical reality, but the fact that it has not been translated into ones and zeros and recorded in any officially recognized database effectively strips them of their access to government benefits and services.

Imagine you are a twenty-year-old man who has migrated to Delhi from a distant village in Assam in the hopes of eking out a living as a street sweeper or construction worker. You were born at home without a birth certificate. Your parents have given you your name but have not registered it with any government office. You know the name of your village and have your memories of your family and neighbors there. You may have a card issued by a local government for some particular purpose such as food rations or receiving a pension. But beyond that, your formal identity as recognized by the state is tenuous. You hold no nationally valid portable or reliable proof of who you are. You aren’t even sure you’re really twenty.

This ambiguity hardly mattered to previous generations of rural Indians, who lived their entire lives in the same village surrounded by people who knew them and could vouch for them. But in the rapidly urbanizing India of today, lack of proper identification bars millions of Indians from gaining access to health care, education, and basic government services, and may preclude them from claiming benefit payments to which they are entitled. Lack of an ID may even prevent them from opening a bank account or renting a mobile phone.

Fortunately, technology offers India the opportunity to dismantle many of these oppressive obstacles. Our nation has embarked on one of the world’s great social experiments, aimed at giving every resident of India who wants one a nationally accepted, unique identity number that public agencies, banks, and private companies can use with ease and confidence. In the process, we are relying on the latest technology—chiefly fingerprint and iris-recognition technologies. This is a far more secure and portable system than the use of physical cards, because a person’s fingerprints and irises are readily amenable to online verification, and the technology, if carefully administered, is all but impervious to fake and duplicate identities. And people don’t have to worry about losing the card or forgetting to bring it with them.

That is the promise

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