We, the common indians are confused about our identity! at least that is the case with me, to decide what ID to show where.

Banks here take Driver’s licence as a proof for creating a new account, and bank account statements are accepted as a proof for Driver’s licence if you goto RTO office [:-O]

In this age of connected world, we saw the a new initiative called UIDAI, initiated to solve the problem, which consumed significant amount of our tax money for it, yet now in confusion over its existence.

So, the question always exists, can’t this misery be solved at all? Most of the people boost themself saying India is IT capital :-O can’t we just solve this simple problem first ?

Lets look at how identity proof are being handled for most of the tasks here:

1. You need a address proof.
2. You need a photo ID proof.

Now, is there a way you can verify if your address is same from date of issue to now? Is your photo ID valid?

I don’t think there exists a proper solution to this right now. Well, thats what everyone hoped UIDAI is going to solve.

Below, I explain how technology can solve this if implemented correctly:

1. List down the separate entities:

(Includes: person, property, family, power/electricity, water, phone number, company, shop, etc)

2. List down the relation between entities:

• A property has same address (not changing), but can be transferred between persons.
• A property can change its type (commercial, agriculture, residential), and its size (ie, it was a house(1), now changed to apartment with 10 houses(10)).
• A person has one ID (can be DL,PAN,Passport,or all the above), and can change name.
• A person is from a family (can be treated as ‘mom + dad’ pair) and his DOB remains same.
• A family is ‘created’ on the date of marriage.
• Power/electricity links to a address/property and not to a person.
• Water supply is given to a property and not to a person.
• Email address of a person remains same, and his phone number may change.

Now, we have a clear picture of how to implement a relational Data Base. Couple of Billion records is not a big number :-) mainly with the technologies available today.

Go ahead and implement a application with proper relations like this, and now, start with putting your land records online. If security is major concern, make sure all this runs inside a VPN, so no others have access. As the registrar offices are well spread, this task is distributed. Now, within month, you have all the land records online. Seeing the progress is just running one query on your database :-) As a side effect, you know who is not working too!!

Once you have land record online, and have similar number of person/company record created for it (because each land record associates with one person or a company). Next task is merging the duplicates. Bulk of the merge happens in case the land belongs to Government right away. Further merging can be tricky as people would have given different ID cards while buying different properties. But that is fine, you can solve it eventually. Don’t try to optimise very early.

Well, I understand that not everyone owns a property, so lets move on to creating ‘person’ table. Go to RTO offices, and upload all the person related data. (Distributed, so should be quick to finish this). Goto Income Tax office, start updating PAN card details to person table. Same in Passport office.

Now, your task is to merge or delete (or even better, mark as invalid, so police can re-verify these record later) entries from the person table. You know the address of each person, go ahead and see if they exist in such place. Can be done in 1 month as all you need to do is verifying if the data is valid.

Now, make your system fool proof by automatically updating these records during the registration of new property. Once a property ownership changes in one place, it changes everywhere related. As a side effect, you have solved the issue of bribe, harassment and inefficiency of the people at registrar office.

Next, give an API to this application, which can be used by all Govt. officials, who can verify the details of a person or property. It can be accessed only from Govt offices, and there are logs on who accessed the data on someone, so it is easy to catch hold of data stealer, in case of some data theft. Now, an officer can validate your ID from his phone. (A smart phone costs 5k INR which is cheaper than salary of any one person, and you can allow them to pursue their dream with this technology by letting most of them free).

Once all of this is in place, you provide this validation as a service to private companies like bank, telephone, and anyone who wishes to validate identity. Now, because you are up-to-date with the data, everyone comes to you, and you recover the money invested to implement the technology within no time. Soon, you are making profit, directly and indirectly (by letting people to pursue their dreams). Because every company asks for this validation, everybody will make sure their data is updated in the database.

Even after all these, one can argue, there are people below poverty line, who may not get into this. They have BPL card. Add it to identity. Make sure a person’s detail got entered during birth certificate delivery. Add a ‘family’ entry during marriage registration. If not present, add it while child’s birth certificate delivery.

Extend it to school, and make sure by the time a person is admitted, both person detail and family detail of their parents exists :-)

Within one year, OK, if you think pessimist, take 2 years, everything falls in place, and you have solved need of RTI (one of the achievement of 67 years of indian independence) altogether. As a side effect, you have all the data to mine, visualise, analyze and predict. Possibilities are limitless if you can bring data about 1Billion people online :-)

I rest my case!

Thanks to : Basavanagowda Kanur