Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations (4 page)

With his characteristic wry humour, Shankar Maruwada tells us a story from his time in the trenches at UIDAI. ‘As part of the marketing team, we made a real effort to reach out to the people and understand whether they would be interested in enrolling for Aadhaar. Naman Pugalia, one of our volunteers, spoke to a villager standing in line to enrol for Aadhaar in the forty-degree Celsius summer heat of north India. The villager said that although he already had three other forms of ID, he was still waiting patiently to get a fourth. When Naman asked him why, he replied,
“Budbak, agar hamare paas teen bhains hai,
aur sarkar hamein chauthi bhains de rahi hai, to hum nahin khade honge?”
(Idiot, if I have three buffaloes, and the government is giving me a fourth, won’t I stand in line?)’

This ‘a-ha’ moment, the realization that the Indian people valued an ID as an economic asset, was especially important for Aadhaar. A programme that’s meant to deliver unique IDs to 1.2 billion people, and which places no restrictions on what that ID can be used for, must necessarily be outside the realm of the ordinary, and its success largely depends on its acceptance by the people. A great deal of thought went into the design of both the Aadhaar scheme itself and the organizational structure tasked with its execution, in the process creating a new template for technology-enabled projects within government.

What are some of Aadhaar’s unusual attributes? To begin with, it is not mandatory to possess an Aadhaar number—residents can choose to enrol voluntarily, and no government service or benefit is allowed to mandate the use of Aadhaar for identity verification. The second is its openness, exemplified by the fact that Aadhaar is designed as a platform providing a single service—identity verification—that can be easily plugged into any application requiring such a service. Today, Aadhaar is used to verify identity in a host of government schemes and services. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act now uses Aadhaar numbers to make payments; recipients can withdraw money through Aadhaar-linked microATMs. The subsidy for Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) is administered by linking a consumer’s information with their Aadhaar numbers. Banks have established e-KYC (electronic-Know Your Customer) processes using Aadhaar to open new bank accounts, and the government itself uses Aadhaar to track the attendance of employees.

A few months after his appointment as chairman, Nandan met K.V. Kamath, then the chairman of ICICI bank, to deliver a presentation about Aadhaar and its uses. At the end of his talk, an amazed Kamath declared that the entire scheme boasted of a ‘diabolical simplicity’. Part
of the reason for this simplicity was purely practical—if you have to collect 1.2 billion data sets that will be compared against each other every time a resident uses their Aadhaar number, it’s best to collect the least possible amount of information.

Pragmatism also dictates that the path to success is easier if you provide a ‘thin’ solution—one that does not infringe on turf that other government agencies lay claim to. Aadhaar provides a single, clearly defined piece of information—a person’s identity—and nothing more. This minimalistic approach tipped the scales in favour of collaboration over competition. Equally important, the agencies that chose to use Aadhaar were given the freedom to decide how they wanted to deploy it, whether it was for opening bank accounts or distributing pensions. Providing this level of freedom also helped to dramatically reduce the friction between the stakeholders in the system.

Aadhaar’s simplicity was not restricted to its use; it was clearly manifested in the enrolment process as well. We wanted to provide residents with the kind of smooth and seamless experience they have come to expect from the private sector. With this goal in mind, people were given the freedom to enrol in any manner and at any location that was most convenient (we explain this enrolment model in greater detail in the following chapter). We also granted ourselves the same freedom of choice when it came to building the technology platform for implementing Aadhaar.

Another important design principle we adopted was that of asynchronicity—every part of the Aadhaar ecosystem was designed to function independently. For example, states could choose to begin Aadhaar enrolments at their own pace. Registrars could join the system and enrolment agencies could scale up their activities as per their convenience. This asynchronicity extended to Aadhaar’s technical platform as well. Whether internal or external, there was no dependence on any one critical step which, if improperly executed, could bring the whole process to a crashing halt.

Any citizen-centric design in India today must take into account the shifting demographics of our country. With an increasingly mobile population, we need services that are no longer geographically tethered
to one location and which are easily portable. Many government services are perceived to be citizen-unfriendly because the fear of fraud has made entry into the system inconvenient at best and impossible at worst. Aadhaar was meant to reach precisely those people who had traditionally been excluded from government systems due to lack of documentation; we harnessed the power of technology to lower entry barriers, promoting inclusivity, while setting up fraud detection systems at the back end to safeguard data integrity and weed out malpractice.

For fourteen months, while the UIDAI core team laboured to build the organization and the technology to start generating Aadhaar numbers, Nandan travelled to every state of India on what he calls his ‘yatra’, meeting the chief minister, the chief secretary or other senior officials to get their personal commitment to the Aadhaar project, operating on the principle that an entrepreneur always goes to his customers to drum up business, not the other way around.
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This went to the extent that if Nandan had to meet a chief minister in Delhi, ‘I would make it a point to meet him in his Bhavan and not make him come to my office. By doing this, I was signalling to them that I care about you and I am coming to you because I want your help in doing something nationally important.’ This small touch was enough to melt any resistance and get their support. Every chief minister saw a different value in the Aadhaar programme, depending on the specific needs of his or her state. For example, Nitish Kumar, then the chief minister of Bihar, appreciated the fact that Aadhaar was designed to address the needs of a highly mobile population, a major concern in a state from which people routinely migrate for education or employment.

The same philosophy came into play to get other major players on board. In the financial sector, Nandan had started establishing contact with such organizations as the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the State Bank of India (SBI), the Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) and others even before his official appointment as UIDAI chairman. He and members of his team met representatives of these organizations
and many others—the Indian Banks Association, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and India Post, to name a few. Simultaneously, he was also reaching out to all the central ministries, the railways and the defence establishment. Nandan reminisces, ‘A surprise for me was how stiff and hierarchical the system was. Information reached you only through “official” channels, levels of hierarchy were strictly observed and you were never supposed to go to an office of someone junior, or be on the line when he calls. I decided to break out of all that and reached out to everyone, from Cabinet ministers to their private secretaries.’

Other stopping points on his evangelization tour were commercial organizations like telecom and oil companies, multilateral agencies like the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, bilateral agencies like the Department for International Development, and various media outlets. This helped to create a powerful coalition that had a stake in the success of Aadhaar, and the value of these efforts was seen when Aadhaar enrolments finally began. State governments across the political spectrum signed up for their residents to be enrolled for Aadhaar, and a huge ecosystem with multiple public and private partners sprang into existence to leverage the power of the Aadhaar platform.

Ranjana Sonawane’s Aadhaar enrolment in September 2009 signalled an entry into the phase where operations needed to be scaled up. After flagging off the first enrolment, the UIDAI raced to reach a run rate of one million enrolments a day. In order to do so, MoUs were signed with registrars, enrolment agencies were brought on board, operators were trained, a biometric device ecosystem was created, enrolment and de-duplication software was continuously upgraded and fine-tuned to function at scale, servers were procured, letters were printed and dispatched, and a multilingual call centre was set up to handle queries and grievances. It took a significant amount of time and effort right from the first enrolment to scale each of these processes to achieve the target of generating one million Aadhaar numbers a day, but when Nandan tendered his resignation as chairman of the UIDAI on 13 March 2014, he could do so with the knowledge that
the UIDAI had succeeded in its goal of delivering over 600 million Aadhaar numbers in less than five years of its existence. In fact, over 900 million residents have been registered for Aadhaar in the five years since Ranjana Sonawane received her Aadhaar.

The UIDAI faced a number of challenges in its early days, as the accompanying diagram explains. Perhaps the biggest was from the home ministry, responsible for creating the National Population Register (NPR), a scheme that proposed to collect biometrics and issue a smart card to every citizen of India.
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Aadhaar, on the other hand, was designed purely as a number for identity, carrying no information on the holder’s citizenship status. The UIDAI had also got off to a faster start than the home ministry; by the time Aadhaar enrolments had begun, the Registrar General of India (RGI) had only carried out a few pilot studies for the NPR. Even so, the idea that two separate government agencies would collect the biometric details of all Indian residents for two separate schemes was seen as a waste of government money by the Department of Expenditure in the Ministry of Finance.

Given the overlap between the two projects, the home ministry wanted the UIDAI to stop enrolling residents, and instead act as a back-end organization, collecting and sharing all data with the NPR. The RGI and the home ministry felt that they were the agencies responsible for running any sort of identity scheme, and that the UIDAI was an unwelcome intruder into their turf, thus rousing their protectionist instincts. Eventually, a consensus was reached and the RGI agreed to become a registrar of UIDAI, in effect enrolling residents for the Aadhaar number. The government directed the UIDAI to carry out enrolment in half the states of India and the RGI in the other half. The software of the UIDAI and the NPR were also made compatible so that the data collected for Aadhaar could also be used by the NPR. This détente proved beneficial to both the projects, and nearly a fourth of all those who have received an Aadhaar number have been enrolled by the RGI.
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Despite initial
opposition, the then home minister P. Chidambaram was later quoted as saying that Aadhaar was a tool of empowerment for ‘those at the bottom of the pyramid, the poor, the migrant workers, the homeless and the oppressed’.
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The next speed bump centred around the UIDAI’s decision to use biometric authentication, specifically the use of iris scans. The Planning Commission formally raised the issue of whether the additional expenditure of capturing the iris data was justified..
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Expert members of the Biometric Standards Committee constituted by the UIDAI had suggested that fingerprint data alone would not be robust enough on which to base the promise of 1.2 billion unique identities. Fingerprints can wear out due to physical labour and are unstable in the case of children younger than sixteen. On the other hand, iris patterns are nearly fully developed at the time of birth and remain constant throughout an individual’s life. Despite what we may have seen in the movies, it is very difficult to duplicate someone’s iris, and multiple international security systems (such as border control and immigration) routinely capture iris data for security purposes.