Senior Fellow Alan Gelb and Policy Analyst Julia Clark are mentioned in a Bloomberg piece on their large volume of work surrounding Biometric IDs following the Center for Global Development's Eighth Annual Richard H. Sabot Lecture: Technology to Leapfrog Development: The Aadhaar Experience, featuring Nandan Nilekani, co-founder of Infosys Ltd. (INFY) and one of the world’s most successful information-technology entrepreneurs.
People who grew up in Britain in the 1960s will remember a television program that built a cult following: “The Prisoner.” It was about an oddly luxurious detention camp -- a kind of Guantanamo Bay by Four Seasons, spa services and brainwashing included. Even if you wanted to, trying to escape was pointless. A big balloon would chase you and bring you back. The residents didn’t have names, just numbers. The show’s tagline was: “I am not a number. I am a free man.”
The phrase came to mind while I listened this week to Nandan Nilekani, co-founder of Infosys Ltd. (INFY) and one of the world’s most successful information-technology entrepreneurs. Speaking at the Center for Global Development in Washington, he was describing India’s remarkable Unique Identification (UID) project, also called Aadhaar, which he is leading.
Nilekani explained that since the program began in 2010, more than 300 million Indians have acquired a unique ID number associated with 12 biometric markers -- 10 fingerprints and two iris scans. (Collecting that much data for each enrollee minimizes errors.) At today’s stunning rate of progress, reaching the goal of covering India’s population of 1.2 billion will take less than five years. The audience listened admiringly, and asked not a single hostile question.
That’s because it was an audience of development specialists, and the benefits of universal ID in poor countries are potentially huge. In advanced economies, proposals to gather biometric data and associate them with universal ID numbers immediately raise civil-liberties concerns. Not long ago the U.K. abandoned plans for a national ID card, partly on grounds of cost and partly because the idea was unpopular. This contrast in attitudes is worth pondering.
In recent years many developing countries have embarked on biometric ID programs. The Center for Global Development’s Alan Gelb and Julia Clark have surveyed 160 such projects and written an indispensable guide: “Identification for Development: The Biometrics Revolution.” As they and Nilekani point out, India’s project is unusual for its scale and scope, and because its aim was to create a system of identification independent of the uses to which it might be put -- a platform that can support many uses, rather than one specific application (such as checking eligibility for poverty relief).
India’s UID project isn’t just popular with the experts. Take-up has been astonishingly quick not because participation is compulsory (it isn’t -- yet) or because pressure (such as denial of services) is brought to bear, but because so many Indians appear to want an officially recognized identity. ID cards are sometimes framed and hung on the wall.
People in rich countries take their possession of an official identity so much for granted that they’re often unaware they have one. Many of the world’s poorest people have no documents to say who they are. In their dealings with employers and the state, you could say, they don’t fully exist. For them, a universal ID is an affirmation of personhood, a condition for civil liberty rather than a threat to it.
In practical terms, the potential benefits are exciting. Fighting corruption heads the list. Leakage of payments and services intended for the poor is notoriously high in many developing countries. Biometric IDs help to eliminate “duplicates, ghosts and the deceased,” as Gelb and Clark put it. In Nigeria, biometric audits reduced the number of pensioners by almost 40 percent. India’s UID program already seems to be saving far more than its cost of $3 or less an enrollee. A recent study for India’s National Institute for Public Finance and Policy found an internal rate of return of more than 50 percent.