What Does It Mean to be No One?

Our lives are sprinkled with anxieties about identity theft.  But what if you have no identity, none, none at all?  That's an accurate description of 1.2 Billion people currently living in the Asian subcontinent of India.  They live and move without trace from one end of the country to the other, and speak more than 300 languages and dialects.  They don't worry about identity theft, but, and the great majority, let us keep in mind, are women and children, do worry about the reality that with no verifiable identity they can't get government benefits, a bank account in which to deposit their meager pay, insurance, or credit. 

Along comes Aadhaar (which means "the foundation"), a massive unique identification project which combines fingerprinting and iris scans of the 1.2 billion and proposes to link them to unique identification numbers which can then be used for all the practical purposes to which we put birth certificates and photo IDs. 

This amazing visionary project is in progress as we speak thanks to the rising tide of technological devices and software, the organizational and motivating skills of  billionaire Nandan Nilekani, nicknamed the "Bill Gates of Bangalore", and the Indian government, not known for it's ability to get anything accomplished.   Here's Nilekani speaking about India in a way you may not have heard before.



The full story of India's groundbreaking Universal Identification Project is laid out, with the wit and intelligence I've come to expect, by Vince Beiser and "Wired Magazine".  Not only is this article morally uplifting and intellectually stimulating enough to enhance your holiday season, "Wired" deserves kudos for providing top-notch journalism without selling your eyes to a multitude of advertisers by making you click through page after page just to follow the thoughts.  Nor do they, like "Time Magazine", follow every paragraph with a link to some other article (gotta sell those page views), using an algorithm that makes "suggestions" that can only be described at times as bizarre.

Back to the point of this post.  While it may be fairly obvious how having the ability to get a bank account, get credit, etc. can benefit India's outsiders, here's what their inclusion in the economy has to offer India.

Today, less than half of Indian households have a bank account. The rest are “unbanked,” stuck stashing whatever savings they have under the mattress. That means the money isn’t gaining interest, either for its owner or for a bank, which could be loaning it out. India’s impoverished don’t have much to save—but there are hundreds of millions of them. If they each put just $10 into a bank account, that would add billions in new capital to the financial system.

WNL:  I'm thinking, if the Government of India can partner with a techno genius to connect 1.2 billion citizens with a reliable form of universal information in a massive database, why can't the US do the same?  Screams about Antichrist and totalitarian takeovers will be heard of course.  But think how many government and commercial interactions could be streamlined and policy problems, like immigration for one, could be addressed if America adopted such an extremely reliable, nontransferable, nonfakable way to identify individual human beings?   It may be time for us to stop dithering and take a hard look at identity issues again - and maybe catch up with India.

In case you are interested in the discussion going on in India about Aadhaar in more detail, take a look at this opinion piece in "The Hindu".