Following the Center for Global Development's Eighth Annual Richard H. Sabot Lecture: Technology to Leapfrog Development: The Aadhaar Experience, Senior Fellow Alan Gelb, Policy Analyst Julia Clark, and speaker Nandan Nilekani are featured in a Washington Post piece on Biometric IDs.
Could a semi-Orwellian program to collect biometric data for 1.3 billion Indians become a key tool to pulling people out of extreme poverty and integrating them into the global economy? The world’s largest democracy is betting it will, and that it could offer important benefits in poorer countries around the world.
In this case, Big Brother has a name. It is Nandan Nilekani, Indian technology entrepreneur, founder of outsourcing company Infosys, and now chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India – an agency that is collecting fingerprints and iris scans of all Indian residents and assigning them a unique ID number in a massive database on the cloud.
This is not, Nilekani insists, a scary example of government intrusion. Rather, he and others described the effort in near revolutionary terms during a lecture Monday at the Center for Global Development in Washington.
Suddenly, said Nilekani, tens of millions of people born without a birth certificate or any formal registration “exist” in the eyes of the government – and can demand services and benefits, get a mobile phone or open a bank account. Putting all the data on the cloud, he said, breaks the monopoly of civil servants over the distribution of such things as food and fuel subsidies.
Once you’re in the database, your identity can be verified at any government office, distributed from a bank, or transferred automatically to a bank account. It’s efficient. It cuts down on opportunities for corruption, such as bribes or what economists call “rent-seeking,” the skim off the top an official might demand for delivering a service. It vests people in the system – so much so that the roughly 30,000 registration sites Nilekani’s agency has established around India are registering a startling 1 million people a day. More than 300 million have been registered since the effort began, and the aim is to have half the population in the database in another year or so.
At the Center for Global Development, experts on the issue such as Alan Gelb are studying how Nilekani’s system – and indeed technology and biometrics generally – might speed development. Having a basic way to verify identity doesn’t just change the dynamics between citizen and government; it could encourage companies to set up, for example, health insurance systems in a given area because they are able to authenticate a policyholder’s identity.
It’s also a real example of how steady advances in computing power are changing the nature of how governments do business. The exercise involves collecting and manipulating massive amounts of data. To ensure that a person’s biometric information isn’t duplicated, Nilekani said, the Indian government chose to take prints from all 10 fingers and scans of both eyes – enough data from each individual to guarantee “uniqueness across a billion people.”