Learning Digital Identity

Chapter 13. Federated Identity—Leveraging Strong Relationships

Aadhaar, the Indian universal identity system, was launched in 2009 with the aim of giving every Indian citizen a biometrically authenticated identifier. Just scanning the irises and fingerprints of one billion people is a stupefyingly large task. The even bigger task is making it useful in Indian life.

I traveled to Bangalore, India, in 2018 to help run a workshop that I and the other Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) organizers helped plan.¹ By coincidence, the Digital Identity Research Initiative (DIRI) at the Indian School of Business sponsored an event the same week on Aadhaar. Attending the DIRI event help me learn more about Aadhaar, which is the foundation for many digital identity systems in India. In fact, aadhaar means “foundation” in Hindi.

The highlight of the week was visiting a village outside Vijayawada near India’s east coast, thanks to an Aadhaar field trip that Omidyar Network organized for me and a few others. We talked with fertilizer distribution agents, farmers, families receiving food distribution, people running the distribution centers, an insurance office at a local hospital, and a bank officer. They showed us how Aadhaar was being used in their respective areas. We saw challenges but also heard positive stories from people in the trenches.

Aadhaar’s goals are to reduce fraud, make taxation more efficient, and save money. The program has had a positive impact on the lives of Indian people, ...