How Do You Take 1.3 Billion People to the Bank?

In the futurist law now named after him, the late Stanford University computer scientist Roy Amara once declared, “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” India’s public digital infrastructure — in many ways, an immense online bureaucracy — is an outlier to this principle. The effort was written-off in the short run, but, less than a decade after it was introduced, it has mobilized technology at the grass-roots, tapping into the country’s huge domestic potential. India is now ready to share its experience with the developing world.

The system — built on a unique 12-digit identification code for each Indian resident — has significantly improved financial inclusion, access to public documents and services, tax compliance, retail payments and the management of government subsidies. The key has been the Aadhaar card – the national identity document. Aadhaar was launched in 2009 by the government of then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. To run the program, he roped in Nandan Nilekani, a veteran of Infosys, the country’s homegrown technology giant. It was an ambitious attempt to reach and electronically organize the more than 1.3-billion people living in India’s sprawling, varied and sometimes inaccessible territory.