Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations by Nandan Nilekani, Viral Shah

sensors and has spurred innovation in sensor technology worldwide. Thedemand generated by the UIDAI has led to a ten-fold drop in sensor costs, from over $5000 to $500 per device.’ Biometrics used to be a restricted-use technology for security applications; now, it has been thrown open to the Indian public for the targeted delivery of social services—consider that Apple launched its fingerprint-based Touch ID on the iPhone in 2013, four years after Aadhaar was up and running. As a result of competition and scale, it was estimated that UIDAI’s cost per de-duplication was the lowest in the world by a factor of three. Srikanth Nadhamuni explains the numbers to us. ‘The worldwide benchmark for a single de-duplication was on the order of Rs 20. We managed to carry out de-duplications at a cost of Rs 2.75 per query.’
    As enrolments scaled up, the team started finding aberrations in the biometric data due to mistakes in scanning. Vivek Raghavan, an expert in integrated circuit design, was one of the lead volunteers heading the UIDAI’s early biometric efforts and the proud holder of what he calls ‘the most interesting title at UIDAI’—his official title didn’t even use the word ‘volunteer’, it just said Biometrics. He tells us, ‘There were a number of data packets where the iris data for the left and right eye had been switched—it turns out the camera used for the iris capture had been inadvertently flipped. We found out about this error in early January 2011 and fixed it within a month, in which time we had to invent a bunch of algorithms to detect flipped iris images and correct them—you actually need to check the position of the tear gland in every image.’ They caught these and similar errors only because they had a strong set of quality checks in place, allowing them to fix these mistakes quickly without forcing individuals to re-enrol and ensuring that all the captured data met quality standards.
Completing the cycle: The Aadhaar letter
    Once enrolment and de-duplication are complete and an Aadhaar number is issued, every resident receives a printed letter with their number and demographic information. Today, that thick, laminated sheet of A5 paper is a familiar sight at airports, in trains and at bank branches. When it came to getting these letters out to people, therewas considerable discussion on whether to use a courier service. But at the end of the day, the only agency in the country with the reach and the staff to decipher such cryptic names and addresses as ‘X, Y’s son, who lives behind the old school’, was India Post. The postman is a government employee, and his delivery of the letter is considered as an official verification of one’s address that can be used for other government procedures. He is also the person most likely to know every nook and cranny of the locality in which he operates as well as the families who live there, granting him the facility of decoding complex or incomplete addresses.
    After generating an Aadhaar, the data would be sent to India Post for printing. As Ashok Pal Singh recollects, ‘India Post never took us seriously when we told them that in a short time frame, one million Aadhaars will be generated daily—perhaps thinking how a government programme could scale this fast.’ Very soon, the printed letters piled up, and people were waiting for months to receive them. In order to add capacity, other printers were contracted and the backlog was addressed. Letters were also sorted by PIN code and delivered to India Post at different points across the country to ease the load on the postal network.
    Despite these efforts, letters do sometimes fail to reach the intended recipient, perhaps because the address is incomplete, the recipient has moved or the letter has been lost in transit. Enter electronic, or e-Aadhaar. The resident can go to the UIDAI’s website, enter their enrolment number, download a copy of their letter and simply print it out for