Via John Mauldin, Raoul Pal says,
India, pre-2009, had a massive problem for a developing economy: nearly half of its people did not have any form of identification. If you were born outside of a hospital or without any government services, which is common in India, you don’t get a birth certificate. Without a birth certificate, you can’t get the basic infrastructure of modern life: a bank account, driving license, insurance or a loan. You operate outside the official sector and the opportunities available to others are not available to you. It almost guarantees a perpetuation of poverty and it also guarantees a low tax take for India, thus it holds Indian growth back too.
…But in 2009, India did something that no one else in the world at the time had done before; they launched a project called Aadhaar which was a technological solution to the problem, creating a biometric database based on a 12-digit digital identity, authenticated by finger prints and retina scans.
Read the whole essay. He goes on to claim that this greater legibility (to use James Scott’s term) will greatly increase India’s efficiency and economic growth.
You may know that about ten years ago economist Hernando de Soto drew attention to the idea that legibility of property ownership would do wonders for capital formation in underdeveloped countries. It is plausible that human legibility is even more important.
To be a bit crotchety, this problem does not require a technological solution. It simply requires the government deciding to issue registration certificates. Anyone who shows up looking for a bank account, driving license, insurance or a loan is then told to go get themselves a registration certificate. Sure, they’ll need relatives or witnesses to attest to who they are, but they only need to do that once. Then it’s just like they have a birth certificate.
The difference between India and others is the different paths to “legibility.” In the West, “legibility” develops relatively slow and organically: surnames emerge as organic expressions of place names and family/personal occupations co-incident with conquest and incrementally centralizing feudal systems. So there is pre-existing social phenomena that is “embedded” to use an image Reihan Salaam used to be fond of. In short, that path to “legibility” has lots of “bottom-up” features.
At first blush, and without a lot of context not necessarily present in the source article, this Indian project seems very top-down. Creates lots of opportunity for mischief via public choice issues or government monitoring/manipluation. C.f. what’s going on in China with WeChat: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/10/technology/china-homegrown-internet-companies-rest-of-the-world.html?_r=0.
also here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAesMQ6VtK8