Learning from India's Aadhaar programme
Economic inclusion of citizens has seen some success in Bangladesh. The progress in the successful adoption of IT in delivering healthcare services has been recognised by the World Health Organisation (WHO). Further, programmes under Access to Information (a2i) are making Bangladesh digitally empowered.
For a country like Bangladesh, technology will be important for collecting and authenticating data. Hardware and software have to be easily portable, since data collection will happen in remote areas too. Data collection kits need to be inexpensive to ensure their widespread use.
In this regard, India's programme towards digital identity creation can serve as a good reference point. The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) started creating unique identification numbers for each Indian resident eight years ago.
According to the UIDAI website, it has created unique identification numbers for more than 122 crore individuals. This means enrolment has been happening at an average speed of five individuals per second.
India had been working on the development of a national register of its residents for a while. The country runs a number of benefit programmes meant for the poor, but there was no robust and accurate mechanism to monitor them.
There were apprehensions of misuse of funds allocated for the benefits and of the benefits not being delivered to the intended recipients. So, the government aimed to develop a robust system for monitoring the direct to delivery of benefits to recipients.
In 2009, the government of India took a historically significant step by forming UIDAI with the aim of creating a digital identity for each resident of the country.
The government hired an eminent entrepreneur and an IT doyen as the head of that authority.
The first achievement of this authority was to create a team comprising the best bureaucrats and the best technocrats. Bureaucracy and technocracy follow two different cultures.
Bureaucrats are generally employed by governments and they tend to use formal communication. On the other hand, technocrats, particularly those who work for private entrepreneurial organisations, have a very informal communication style. In addition, bureaucrats follow a hierarchy within their organisations, while technocrats have a non-hierarchical style of working.
The formation of a winning team consisting of people from such diverse environments was instrumental to the success of this programme.
The successful roll-out of the programme on such a huge scale was significantly dependent on the deployment of the right technology for data collection, data deduplication and identity authentication.
The appointment of a technology specialist to lead this initiative created a unique advantage and made the selection of the most relevant technology relatively easy. Additionally, the presence of a respectable figure at the top attracted technology professionals around the world to join this programme and contribute voluntarily.
The second successful achievement was the clear definition of the deliverable. India, being a vast country, is full of challenges and opportunities. Instead of trying to solve those directly, the Aadhaar programme aimed to create a database where each resident individual would receive a unique identification number (i.e. Aadhaar number) and an authentication method to allow others to verify the Aadhaar number.
Each resident would be identified using his/her biometric data, such as finger prints and iris scan. The database would store the person's name, address, email, mobile number, and some other information.
After collecting this data, the system would verify for duplicate registration. This technology-based deduplication process would eliminate the risk of duplicate Aadhaar numbers getting issued to the same person.
It would work faster and with fewer errors.
On the other hand, the authenticating agency would need to connect to the Aadhaar system and submit the individual's Aadhaar number along with biometric data to authenticate the person.
The system would instantaneously inform the agency whether the person submitting his/her biometric data was the actual possessor of the Aadhaar number.
Subsequently, the agency could proceed with its own tasks, such as issuing a mobile or cooking gas connection.
The third successful achievement of this programme was the nationwide roll-out. The authority had engaged world-renowned designers to design the data collection toolkit.
The toolkit was easily portable to remote corners of the country to enrol residents for Aadhaar number generation. Such an innovative design led to the issuance of Aadhaar numbers to most of the residents of India within a short time.
The success of the programme also relied on the deployment of authentication toolkits. The authentication toolkit was designed to be simple and inexpensive.
A set of manufacturers were certified to create and sell such toolkits at a low cost, thereby helping the proliferation of Aadhaar verification based services rapidly.
As per the UIDAI website, more than 23 billion authentication transactions have been completed successfully till now.
Finally, the successful roll-out of the Aadhaar programme has started delivering benefits on multiple fronts. For example, cooking gas distributors in India collectively identified more than four crore customers as duplicate beneficiaries using Aadhaar-based authentication.
As a result, the government could prevent leakage of billions of rupees in cooking gas subsidy.
In addition, private enterprises have also begun to enjoy the benefits of Aadhaar. A new mobile network operator used the Aadhaar-based customer authentication process to acquire 100 million customers in just six months.
Such an innovative strategy helped the mobile network operator to scale nationally and get recognised as one of the leaders.
Bangladesh already has some of the basic ingredients required for a successful digital identity programme. A robust framework with the right set of technologies and a winning team can result in a reliable, efficient and sustainable digital identity programme. Lessons from the neighbouring country's journey may be useful too.
The writer is a partner at PwC. The views expressed here are personal.
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