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’). (more…)