How do you take 1.3b people to the bank?

In the futurist law now named after him, the late Stanford University computer scientist Roy Amara once declared, “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” India’s public digital infrastructure — in many ways, an immense online bureaucracy — is an outlier to this principle. The effort was written-off in the short run, but, less than a decade after it was introduced, it has mobilized technology at the grass-roots, tapping into the country’s huge domestic potential. India is now ready to share its experience with the developing world.
The system — built on a unique 12-digit identification code for each Indian resident — has significantly improved financial inclusion, access to public documents and services, tax compliance, retail payments and the management of government subsidies. The key has been the Aadhaar card – the national identity document. Aadhaar was launched in 2009 by the government of then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. To run the program, he roped in Nandan Nilekani, a veteran of Infosys, the country’s homegrown technology giant. It was an ambitious attempt to reach and electronically organize the more than 1.3-billion people living in India’s sprawling, varied and sometimes inaccessible territory.
While questions were raised about privacy issues, Aadhaar was cleared by the Indian Supreme Court for opt-in use in September 2018; a larger bench of judges affirmed the decision in January 2021. Today, most of India has chosen to join the biometric data system: there are 1.26 billion people officially registered in Aadhaar.
While it began with the Manmohan Singh government, Aadhaar became the backbone of the India’s public digital infrastructure in 2014 when Prime Minister Narendra Modi combined it with his government’s Jan Dhan initiative, a financial inclusion program for India’s huge number of unbanked households. These new accounts were linked to both mobile numbers and Aadhaar, creating the Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-Mobile, or JAM. Today more than 80% of all Indians have a bank account, up from half that level when the program started.
The digital network is now the lynchpin for most of India’s social security and cash transfer programs — which had been notorious for corruption and unreliability. Today, the government uses JAM’s direct benefit transfers for 317 programs. It made 2.6 billion transactions in the current financial year, getting more than $46 billion to beneficiaries. The cumulative value of the transfers since the first programs started in 2013 stands at more than $195 billion. The four big successes of India’s public digital infrastructure have been Unified Payments Interface (UPI), Bharat QR, Bharat Bill Pay System (BBPS) and the RuPay card — which work with all or parts of the digital network’s threefold components of banking, secure identity and mobility.
—Bloomberg