Last week I travelled to India and just at that time one of the largest deduplication projects in the world had been accepted. The project is to provide every Indian citizen with a Unique Identification Number.

Main goals are (amongst others):

• Make life easier for the citizens by diminishing the number of ID documents they have now
• Minimize the fraud possibilities for several projects and welfare schemes
• Possibility to share information between different disciplines and organizations

Anyone who has ever been in India knows that you absolutely need to take into account the variety of cultural aspects in that huge country. In Western Europe it is already very difficult to deduplicate all kinds of citizen data, given all the languages and cultural aspects. I think, however,  that the degree of difficulty is even worse in India, where not all citizens have a registered birth certificate, most will have their first official registration from school, some do not have a last name, addresses are not always that trivial (euphemism), and the whole country is used to the fact that typos are allowed in names, because in one area Shrivastava is actually the same as Srivastava (without ‘h’).

As long as human beings are involved in the deduplication, most things work fine. The problem starts if the human factor is diminished and cold computation takes over. Ask the average Indian colleague about his/her experience to get a visa for the US, or even a plane ticket, given his/her original ‘official’ documents. Indian officials do have experience with this, because it is not the first time this project is launched.

Why will it be successful now? In my opinion, because they have asked Nandan Nilekani as head for the Unique Identification Authorithy of India, and with his experience in both business and IT, his global knowledge on how to tackle such huge problems, he seems to be the best foundation for this project. What is lacking is a serious data quality solution, with knowledge of the cultural aspects in India to bridge all information from the citizens, stored in various data sources to that one unique number. I do actually know a company that can solve that!

Our experience in Western Europe is that  even after the introduction of such unique numbers, you will face fraud, multiple citizens or persons sharing the same ID. And the system needs to be aware of that. Never assume that a Unique ID is really unique! The moment you forget that, the system is open for criminals.

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...