 Welcome to the Center for Global Enterprise Global Scholars Expert Connect series Identity in a Digital World. My name is Ira Sager. I am Vice President of Global Learning Initiatives for the Center for Global Enterprise. For those of you new to the Center for Global Enterprise and our Global Scholars program, CGE is a non-profit research institute focused on the study of global management best practices, the modern corporation, economic integration, and their impact on society. Our Global Scholars program is a worldwide learning community for business interested students, academic faculty, and business professionals. Through Global Scholars we offer online courses and digital internships as well as this and other expert connects. Participation in all our programs and membership is free. You can find more information about our activities on the CGE website. But before we start a few housekeeping chores, today's program is being recorded and will be available on demand via the CGE YouTube channel. We will leave approximately 15 minutes at the end of this session for audience questions. If you have a question for our panelists, you can submit your question using the Q&A feature at the bottom of your Zoom screen. We will try to get to all your questions time permitting. Today's session on India's AdHARP digital ID program is the second forum we've convened to explore the complex issues surrounding how we manage the security and privacy of our identity in an increasingly digital world. CGE launched this forum to showcase the leading edge practical and applied learning on the topic of digital identity and the implications for business and management. Today's focus on India's AdHARP program could be more timely. India's Supreme Court just ruled that the biometric program, the first and largest digital identity system implemented on a national scale, can continue to collect data of its citizens, but it placed new regulations on the balance between identity management and data privacy, a ruling that is likely to have a big impact on countries around the world. Leading our discussion is Dr. Irving Ladowski-Berger, a CGE fellow and former IBM Vice President of Technical Strategy and Innovation, who will introduce today's presenter, Dr. Ram Seewak Sharma, the founding CEO of India's AdHARP ID project. Irving? Thank you, Ira, and welcome everybody to our webinar. It is truly an honor for me to introduce Dr. Ares Sharma, the chairman of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, a position that he has held since August of 2015. In his present job, Dr. Sharma has led major reforms in the sector, including the work in the area of net neutrality, data ownership, privacy and security. Dr. Sharma has been working in the area of public administration over the last 40 years and has long been deeply involved in the areas of e-governance and the delivery of public services in India. But very prominently on the subject of today's webinar, Dr. Sharma was director general and mission director of the unique identification authority of India. As a founding CEO for India's ID project called AdHARP, he was the head of it from 2009 to 2013. I've been following AdHARP very closely since the beginning, because it's such a fascinating project with the scope and all the things that it's been doing. And because clearly, the Indian government has been a true pioneer in the question of identity management. And as Ira Sager just said, the India Supreme Court just made an incredibly important ruling on the balance between identity management and privacy. A ruling that as I read in today's New York time, as I was having my breakfast this morning, is going to have a huge influence, not only in India, but in countries around the world. Dr. Sharma also PhD from IIT Delhi, a master's in computer sciences from University of California at Riverside, and a master's in mathematics from IIT Kanpur. Dr. Sharma, it's a pleasure to have you, and we look forward to your webinar. Thank you very much, friends. And I really feel privileged and honored to be talking to you and on this platform. I have always believed that if something good has been done somewhere, it must be shared with everybody in the world. And so that you other people do not reinvent the wheel. The whole purpose of talking about this project is essentially to spread that message and essentially to share our experiences. The idea is not that these replicates experiences can be exactly replicated as they are, but the idea is that something good can be taken out of these experiences and probably modified in the national context, and then kind of replicated in each country or each domain. So that's the whole purpose. I'm not sure how much time do I have to present to just tell me that and then I'll proceed We have about 20 minutes for your presentation, and then we'd like you to have a discussion with Irving and then we'll open it up to questions for anybody else. Wonderful, wonderful. So I'll try to keep this timeline. So the idea is, again, as you know, I was mentioning yesterday, the Supreme Court of India, you know, kind of gave a thumping ruling saying that, look, as an artifact, as a product, as a digital identity infrastructure, follows all the principles of privacy, preservation, security, and, you know, all data privacy and other, you know, best practices in the digital world. And also, it actually gives empowerment to the poor and marginalized of this country. And therefore, it's a wonderful judgment. And personally, for all of us who worked in Aadha on this project, we have been completely, you know, celebrating since last, last evening. So, so, so I think this presentation would not have come at a more appropriate time. So it has been validated to be something the architecture and the design of this project has been validated to be consistent and in consonance with the broad principles of right to privacy being a fundamental right. So let me just now go to the next slide. So essentially, in the next 20 minutes, I'm going to talk quickly about some of these stuff as to why did we start Aadhaar? Why did we start this digital ID project in India? So context, what are the context? And then how did we begin doing it? What are the desired principles and why does Aadhaar become such an important tool of service delivery? And what are the products that we have built on top of Aadhaar and what have been our experiences thus far? That's the broad, broad agenda. So going to the next slide. Essentially, there were two problems which we had in India. One was there were many people who did not have any formal identity document. Now, to those who are from, let's say, Western Europe or some other developed countries, they may not understand and appreciate this specific aspect that how can there be a board? I mean, as soon as a child is born, you know, some national document or some kind of document is given birth certificates, etc. How is it that some people may not have any ID document in a country? But that was the case with us. There we had, you know, large number of people who do not have any documents which they could use to present before any formal system to do any transaction. So for example, if I wanted to open a bank account, I probably did not have any document to prove my existence. And that was one problem which we were trying to solve, which means can we develop an identity system which is inclusive, which means it's not, it's not difficult for a person to get an ID. So that's one context. The other context was that while many people did not have any ID, there were some other people who had multiple IDs. And the idea was because India was giving subsidies and benefits to individuals, it was beneficial to gain the system by having multiple IDs. So that's another part. So essentially to clean up existing databases from ghosts and duplicates, there were multiple ghosts and duplicates existing in various databases. So how do we create an ID system which can ensure uniqueness in the sense that one person only gets one identity? So put it this way, uniqueness and inclusion were the twin goals with which we were trying to solve these two problems. And of course, a corollary of these two objectives was to improve targeting and delivery of services because if you have an identity, then you can target the services to an individual. And of course, if you have a digital identity, then the digital delivery of services is almost always cheaper than the physical delivery of services with documents and photocopies and stuff like that. That's another part. So these are the four context in some sense which you see on this slide. Next. So essentially, what was one of the problem statements? Second was what were the overarching constraints or objectives which we had? One was uniqueness, I explain to you. Another was scale and speed. Because if you start creating IDs, and India has got 1.2 billion people. And if you are not speedy enough, if you are not quick enough, it might never finish. Because the people who get the number of persons who are born, if your ID system generation has the same rate, then it will go on to infinity. So hence, we had to have some program which could actually ensure a speed. And that our objective was can we do it one million per day? And if you do it one million per day, 1.2 million will make 1.2 billion will take 1200 days, working days, which will mean about four to five years. So so can we do it that fast? Second, scale. The point is, if you have any program, then does it scale up to that level? So that was another issue which we had. How do we make this process easy? Because inclusion was one of the one of the goals. And then of course, the bootstrap problem bootstrap problem is if I ask for ID document to create ID document, then you know, I'm running into a circle circular problem, where a person who has no ID document, he can't get an ID document. So that's that's the bootstrap problem we call it. So that was another one. It has to be cost effective. If you see UK's ID program, it was costing as per London School of Economics study, it was costing about 135 pounds. Now, if we you know, do that, we will spend trillions of you know, rupees trillions of dollars, which is mean huge number of dollars, 1.2 billion multiply that by by 135, you have a huge figure. We have to be cost effective. We have to use technology to ensure uniqueness. It has to be a future proofing, especially when IT systems get obsolete very soon. How do you ensure that the systems are future proof? And of course, we were building a foundational identity, which means this identity is not for a specific purpose. It should be used as a platform for multiple domains. So that was the broad architectural overarching goals with which we begin this program. Next. Now the design choices which we made was essentially, you know, it should be, we will create de novo data creation. If we if we base it on some other database, which already is infected with a lot of duplicates and posts, we will end up creating another erroneous database. Therefore, we said, let's begin de novo. Of course, let's let's also ensure that we don't use any specialized hardware because this will require a huge processing and we can't, we can't sort of depend on one, you know, vendor to provide a system like hardware. So it should be a commodity hardware. It should be an asynchronous unbundled and minimalistic kind of processes, which means we should not create many dependencies to create this program. Because you know, if you create dependencies, then then you know, one thing doesn't happen, then the other thing will just get to stop. So that's another part data driven decision making, we can't depend on anecdotes and stuff like that. So we have to design a system which is based on data driven decision making, decentralized enrollment, centralized processing, because you can't have a central enrollment process. India is such a diverse country with multiple languages, and multiple issues and problems of infrastructure, electricity, power, we can't so we have to have some system where you are. And of course, if you want to provide convenience to people, then you have to have decentralized enrollments. And of course, outcome based enrollment immunizations and open source and open standards, that's very, very important. See, we did not use we decided not to use any of the proprietary stuff. So all our systems of operating systems, communication protocols, systems, they were all open source and they were based on open standards. We also use the third thing, which is called open API, because ultimately, you are making an interoperable platform. And therefore, it has to be based on open APIs. Next. So broadly, these are the features of Adara and I'll quickly go through them. One is that, you know, only numbers, we decided to issue only numbers because we believe that in a connected online world, you don't need any tokens. So we did not use any cards, not neither is smart or non smart. And we just printed the number on a piece of paper and, you know, set it in form of a letter that that's how we did. And we thought that, you know, our whole idea was it's a digital online ID infrastructure, and you don't need to use any of the cards. Secondly, the privacy was built in other design. So we use random numbers. And therefore, the numbers don't have any profiling or intelligence, which means it's a hard 12 visit random number, the 12th visit is a check rate. And therefore, there are effectively 11 visits, which are operational. And you can, you know, as you know, 11 visits will give you 10 to the power 11 numbers, which is 100 billion. So you will have 100 billion number space. And on this number line, all these are random numbers. So they are a spread. And you know, you can't even guess anybody's Aadha. So if I give you a 12 visit random number, you don't know whether it's an Aadhaar number or not Aadhaar number. And if somebody's Aadhaar number, you know, next number may not be Aadhaar number. In fact, the probability is 100. It is voluntary nature. Enrollment was voluntary. All residents including children. So biometric was the basis of unique creating uniqueness. Biometric was collected, not because you know, we wanted to capture everybody's biometric, but there was no other way to ensure that one person only gets one Aadhaar, one number. Because the biometric deduplication, fortunately, you know, nature has created that each person has got unique biometrics. And we took all 10 fingerprints in both iris because fingerprints could not have given us accuracy or more than 95%. And as you know, 1.2 billion 5% is 60 million. So 60 million duplicates would have been floating around. So we actually included iris, which actually gave us the accuracy level of 99.98%. So that's the other part. It actually another part which we ensure that it is just an ID. It did not give any guarantee to citizenship rights entitlement. That's very important because if you would have bogged down to citizenship, then it would have been very difficult exercise for us to continue. So we said all residents are intact. Anybody who's living in India is entitled to four Aadhaar number. And because we just prove this X is X, we said, no, X, what X deserves or what X's entitlements are, we are not going into that. So this is the world's first ID in some sense, which is actually ID without eligibility. This is a very fundamental principle because typically all the ID documents are essentially eligibility documents. You use, for example, driving license to prove your identity, but driving license is essentially an eligibility document that you can drive a vehicle or you can passport the citizenship document. So they are all eligibility documents. These are being built eligibility on top of this identity. So basically we just have minimal identity. And of course, we also started a new thing which nobody in the world had done, which is essentially we provide authentication, which means using your biometrics or your demographics, you can prove without any document just by remembering numbers and some of your identity attributes and put that, and this will basically prove that you are you. So at the service delivery points, you can use this as an authentication mechanism. And this authentication provides ubiquitous services like banking, like mobile, you know, things like getting rationed from the ration shops, subsidized ration, getting the liquid petroleum gas, you know, gas cylinders, cooking gas. So all kinds of, you know, transaxons are authenticated and it is important. Otherwise, if you don't authenticate, you may get my, you know, entitlement and that that becomes a problem. So essentially in order to ensure that there's no proxy in the service delivery, authentication was introduced. Authentication also brought about another revolution, which is your identity now is on the cloud. Your authentication or your eligibility in typical domains is also on the cloud. So therefore, your entitlements are all portable. So portability of entitlements is another important attributes which comes out of authentication. So online authentication service we provide. And just to give you an idea, you know, we have done, we are doing eight billion authentications per month. So that's the, you know, imagine the amount of authentication is being done every day. So that's that's it. Next. This is actually one of the databases which has grown to about 900 billion and five years. So there's no other database in the world, including the private databases, which have grown to one billion and especially, you know, biometric database in five years. And that's that's how it began. The first number we issue in September of 2010. And then, of course, by 2015, you had 950 million. And now, of course, it is saturated. So now you have 1.2 billion by July. And now the rates of increase is very low because now there's only residual populace which is being covered. Next. The question arises, why does Adhaar become so useful? It becomes useful because Adhaar is unique. And therefore, and the Adhaar is existential, which means that you can't have Adhaar, a fake Adhaar. And they said that if there is an Adhaar, there has got to be some person existing. So unique net in existence, they ensure that there are no fakes or duplicates. Then we started a service called Know Your Customer, KYC, and we introduced another concept called Electronic KYC. So the way you do your authentication, immediately the Adhaar authority issues a digitally signed KYC document which gets deposited in the domain. So for example, if I'm going to get a mobile connection, I'll just authenticate myself and the mobile connection company will get my digitally signed document in their database and one can provide a mobile SIM in a paperless manner. Of course, entitlement should reach the beneficiary. So therefore, as I explained to you, non-transferability, which means only I can access my benefits, nobody else can do on my behalf. And this is assured by authentication at the point of service. And many domains are using it at proof of presence. For example, the attendance, you know, in India, the biometric attendance has been introduced and today four million people across the country, in various government offices, they use biometric attendance. So it's basically a digital attendance. Rather than piling some attendance on paper, you just sort of go and put your finger and you are authenticated. And the round-trip time of this is less than two seconds. So therefore, Aadhaar is working on an identity platform and it provides a common plugin for various domains. Next. Now, we constructed, you know, we all, Indians all believe in what is called Trinity. Our gods are also three gods, Brahma, Vishnu, Mahesh, as they call it, you know, somebody who created somebody who sort of takes care and somebody who destroys. So similarly, we came up with this concept called Jam. Now Jam is, the J stands for what is called Janathan, which is essentially financial inclusion. Because we believe that now I'm coming down to the applications of Aadhaar and I think now I have about six, seven, eight minutes. So I'll just conclude quickly. So Janathan is essentially the, you know, financial inclusion and we have opened bank account and 312 million bank accounts were opened in a period of couple of months using the electronic KYC. The Aadhaar I explained to you and mobile, today we have 1.2 billion mobile connections in our country. So almost everybody has got a mobile. Now what we have done is we have linked Aadhaar with mobile and therefore we have created what is called a proxy digital identity. So every time you don't have to do biometric authentication, your mobile through OTP becomes another form of authentication. Next. So we have now, we will have half billion smartphone in 2018. We are adding 25 billion smartphones every quarter. Next. The authentication services are being used in banking, the delivery of food grains and the cooking gas, proof of presence, you know, huge savings with convenience and traceability. In fact, in parliament itself, when the finance minister gave the statement that Aadhaar is saving about 14 billion US dollars every year, about 90,000 crores as they say in Indian rupees. Now that means that you know the total expenditure in Aadhaar is less than one and a half billion. So you can imagine Aadhaar is saving 10 times the amount which has been spent on it every year. Next. So this is actually another part is Aadhaar is now used as a universal financial address, which means I don't have to know the bank account number of an individual. You can change the bank account, but we have created a direct pie to the individual. Using this Aadhaar number, we can transfer money. So today the government is transferring 140 billion credits per month as the subsidy of the liquid petroleum gas, it's a cooking gas. So imagine two billion credit transactions of very small amount, you know about a dollar each, 50 rupees, 60 rupees, that's taking place today. And this is happening in a digital manner. So actually it doesn't really put too much of pressure on the system. The banking system is handling it in a very smooth manner. So essentially government puts in money using an Aadhaar number and the guy can just take it out. Next. Then of course there are multiple products which we have built on top of Aadhaar and I think we don't really have much time but let's go. So next. You know we have done a number of products on top of it. We have done electronic KYC, we have done Aadhaar enabled payment system, we have done Aadhaar payment bridge. We have something called on-demand digital signature, we call it eSign because you can prove your identity online and then you know you can just digitally sign a document. So you don't need a toggle to you know kind of sign a document. Then you have digital locker whereby you can keep your documents in a digital locker and you can digitally sign and share these documents. It's similar to dropouts with a difference that you can digitally sign these documents on-demand and share it. So that's that's the fundamental difference. A non-repudiable you know signatures you can do and do so. And then of course we have the unified payment interface which is again based on Aadhaar. Essentially which is a digital way interoperable, interbanking, digital way to transfer money. So today you transfer very very small amount and the number of UPI transactions has become more than the number of total credit and debit card transactions. Imagine in a couple of years this was lost about one and a half years back and the numbers have already crossed. So that's one and of course consent, application architecture, GST and other things which you have done. Next. So essentially the way Aadhaar how why does Aadhaar become important because it has been designed in a manner which is called a typically hourglass architecture which is minimal, standardized, simple design and easy to write a rule on. So easy to develop products on top of it. Next. So multiple products on top of Aadhaar. Next. It is unique. It's lifetime. We don't use Aadhaar even. Don't reuse Aadhaar number after the death of a person which means that because we have hundred billions of them so we don't need to reuse this. The number also goes with the person. Next. No more physical presence because of the Aadhaar authentication service. Next. No more photocopies because of the digital KYC. Next. E-sign essentially I explain to you this is an online digital signature service and it will be provided. Next. Digital lockers also I mentioned to you. Next. Unified payment interface. This is the great architecture of this which actually enables interoperable payments. My account may be in bank A. Your account may be in bank B. I may have application from X and you can have application from Y and still everything interoperates because of the AUPI unified payment interface. This is a protocol. Next. Electronic consent architecture. This I will not be able to put this. Basically this is a very unique product to India where you can provide a digital consent with all the you know it's an artifact where you have time to lay what are you consenting it. So this this kind of digital world it becomes an extremely important especially the data privacy kind of situation. Next. So we have this you know previous less layer, paper less layer, cash less layer, consent layer. All these products being built on top of it. This is a broad picture of a robust scalable and interoperable low cost architecture. Next. So we are now having huge amount of transactions, digital transactions and we feel that you know India will you know we may not become rich nation but we'll certainly become data rich nation. So it's very very a few years that's and I think we should be able to use this this data for benefits of our citizens. Next. So a couple of applications about you know loans algorithmically which can be given using the credit history which is a digital footprints. So once you have more digital transactions then of course the credit institutions develop confidence in that. Next. So okay I will just skip through these slides. Next please. Yeah so essentially the point is that you know this can be used to provide loans and micro credits to to you know some small people you know they're not even a small enterprise. They are actually just individual enterprises, individual staff which these people are doing so they can get access to credit at low rates of interest because the problem the what we call poverty premium is that the more poor you are the more interest rates you have to pay to get a loan. So that's that's actually a paradox situation. Next. Yeah go ahead. So essentially this is the last concluding slide which is it provides a foundation for a number of innovations and reforms in public service delivery service delivery systems. The direct benefit transfer which means using Aadhaar as a universal financial address to transfer money. It has scaled up and and the Aadhaar delivery systems need to be deployed ubiquitously and of course we need to build you know we need to use this digital footprint data for probably many you know algorithms and AI and other kinds of stuff and of course accelerating the speed of deployment for applications not so much for now that the Aadhaar generation is complete we need to think of more and more applications and I think this this actually has has happened but we need to accelerate it further in a number of other areas. So that's all friends I have to say I think I've been able to maintain the time. Thank you very much. Now I'm open for questions or yeah well thank you so much Dr Sharma and this was an excellent discussion of this incredibly important project so before asking a few questions let me remind everybody in the audience that they can go to the Q&A button at the bottom of the website that you're looking at and at your questions and we will try to get to as many of them as we have time. Dr Sharma said two weeks ago I attended a FinTech conference in Mexico and one of the biggest challenges of many of the startups that I heard present is that they're trying to go after financial inclusiveness but you know in Mexico less than 50% of the population has banking relationships so they struggle with how to authenticate the potential clients of their services and as you said classic KYC is way too expensive. Now what I have heard is because of AdHAR this is no longer a problem in India and you have pure digital banking you have pure digital services that include everybody in the country from the lowest level of income to the highest can you tell us something about the use of AdHAR for digital payments digital money and inclusiveness. Yeah thank you very much I think it is very very important because if you remember the slide which I presented on JAIR the first thing was Janadhan the Jain and Janadhan literally stands for people's money Jan is people and Dan is money so it's people's money and this is something you know which are prime minister Mr Modi sort of a spouse saying that this is people's money and you know bankers typically used to say no nobody wants to open a bank account you know it's not the question of the supply it's a question of demand there's no demand but once it became easy for the bank because bankers were actually realizing that if the cost of opening a bank account was two dollars and the total money which was coming into the system was just about a dollar then why should a banker open a bank account it was not you know so ultimately it's related to the cost of you know cost of subscription put it this way to a system and cost of subsequent transactions so if the cost of one transaction for example if I draw money from ATM and if my cost of transaction is let's say a dollar then if I draw 50 cents it doesn't make any sense so bankers were losing money and bankers therefore were not interested in doing this business so two things happened at a regularly front the Reserve Bank of India gave license you know we came up with the concept of what is called differentiated banking which means all banks don't have to do everything which they don't have to credit and other kinds of stuff so let there be payment backs so we we actually gave license to 24 or 27 payments back in a span of two years which means the job only to do payment and we also told them be digital don't be you know paper based because paper based you will not be able to survive so what happened was then it became extremely easy because it became paper based to open a bank account in fact theoretically believe me I sit in here using my laptop or using my computer I can open a bank account because I can fill up what is called customer acquisition form digitally sign it and ask you know the UID authority of India to you know give the KYC to the bank after I authenticate so KYC to the bank goes the digitally signed customer acquisition form goes to the bank and the bank opens the bank account because that's what it needs so essentially the the magic was to reduce to a provide identity to everybody a digital identity and then secondly to ensure that cost of subscription becomes very low for the banks and thirdly to ensure that the cost of transactions also becomes extremely low so today we have a system whereby the digital transaction and mind you many countries in the world have developed what they call silo systems so for example Kenya developed empathize it's a great innovation I'm not so saying that it's a bad thing but what has happened is it can only communicate you know I can transfer money to another empathize customer not not to everybody so by having an interoperable framework we now ensure that whether you are in bank A or bank B or bank C you are able to interoperably transfer so that was another innovation so digital ID digital KYC and the unified payment interface all put together and use of mobile as a proxy identity it all you know today what's happening the the prime minister of India lost this UPI and and we lost what is called a reference application called B Bharat interface for money and using that protocol today google whatsapp a number of companies I think there are about 50 or 100 companies which have developed applications and which people are you know using and interoperably transferring money now google stage can transfer transfer money to B so any application to any application any bank to any bank that's the match and now the cost of transaction is nothing you know it just one entry into the database from where I am transferring money one entry to the database where I am transferring money to and the you know the settlement authority called NPCI and that's all so that's the that's the way it has been built actually yeah so that that's very impressive so let me get to clarify so if there is a poor person and let's say she's getting a government remit and social service remit and from the government we sad her that goes straight in her digital account and if she now wants to spend it by groceries the grocery is able to accept the digital payment correct and if and what if she wants to get some cash out where can she go to get some of that electronic money in cash for whatever she may need are there places all over the country that will do that as you as I explained to you if you want to get a cash out the typically the cost is very high cost to the banking system cost to the because the number of bank branches let's say we have about 200,000 bank branches but these bank branches they're not accessible what we have done is we have opened you know we have India has got 600,000 villages 600,000 wow and we have 250,000 panchayats panchayats are actually the lowest level of democracy you know electric guys are there and stuff like that so every two and a half villages on an average has a panchayat and in every panchayat we have something called a common service center this common service center is managed by a village level entrepreneur who provides all kinds of digital services because let's also remember that while we are going to have 500 million smartphones even then it is 50 percent of the total population 50 percent of the let's say 1 billion phones so there are 50 500 billion feature phones also where you cannot do digital transactions of course through the the UP you know that whatever USP or whatever it's called so essentially what happens is that this cash out part is done at the village level through the village of course cash out part can also be done with the guy who is actually doing the digital because typically grocery shop owner will be interested in attracting the customer so suppose I go and I buy I pay 100 rupees in digital part I buy 50 rupees worth of goods he may probably give me 50 rupees you know in cash also so sorry because because it's you know ubiquitous in some sense you know there's a bandaid that only banks should deliver the cash or only ATMs should deliver the cash and the amount is pretty small amount is very very small you must understand that the the average transaction size of the UPI transaction is about 10 dollars now that that's very impressive let me ask you one of the questions we got from our audience a Kintola asked how did that hard get the Indian government buying into the program so how did this happen no let me put it this way Aadhaar is a government project Aadhaar is not a private project so it's actually it was started by the government it has been with the government it's a government system only thing is we collected together a set of experts and you know initial people who are technology evangelists and stuff like that and that's how they built it but it's a public good it's a public artifact it's not a private stuff okay very good so that leads me to the second question by Ayobami Oladejo which is often governments when they want to do a program like these bring in very expensive consultants that don't know much about I don't know the condition to advise them what to do how did India how was India able to do this with such a solution so well designed for India who who were your consultants and experts that said Dr. Sharma this is what will work this is what will not work how did you do it it's an extremely interesting question because typically I have been in the public space for about 40 years now the smart of this year I completed 40 years and I joined at the age of 42 now you know the consultants have become the ubiquitous kind of fellows everybody wants to hire a consultant to prepare some report and then you know go about it right we did not go that consultant in fact we did not have any consultant whatsoever however we actually decided that this project cannot be done with without the you know with bureaucrats alone the guys who don't understand technology this project also cannot be done by complete technologists who don't understand public policy or who don't understand ground reality so the only way this project can be done where you combine the efficiency of the private sector and the you know knowledge domain knowledge of the public sector so so what happened this project was headed by Mr. London Delakini he was the chief of the Impost Infosys in fact he is the chairman of Infosys he employing him he was the chairman of this this project I was the director general and descent director so I was number two in some sense then we collected together a team of technology people and you know we got volunteers we got sabbatical fellows and we got all kinds of you know people and we also hired consultants but we did not hire we did not hire agency which could provide us consultant we hired the consultant directly from the market they made them a part of the team so this way it was a team and it was a very thin team let me put it this way total number of people was about 250 all told which is the field fellows the you know the private fellows the technology people and that's how we built because we realized and you know let's also understand that we began I joined for example Nandan joined the UIDAI on 24th of July 2009 I joined a week later but the first number was issued on in the month of September 2010 so it took us in months to actually design and architect and make pilots and other kinds of preparations rides environment softwares you know hire some of these of course we did hire the biometric deduplication agencies because we there's no open source biometric deduplication technology available but we had another interesting thing we hired three of them and we hired in such a manner that if one of them doesn't but we'll just unplug him and plug in another one and we did that in fact going forward so essentially we we were very conscious there shall be no banter lock in and therefore whosoever comes in we should have a plug and play kind of a structure we did not have any equipment locking also for example the enrollment equipment could be of any brand so long that it's at a certain minimum criteria it's fine with us so essentially this was the this was the thought process and I think there was nothing secret so that's why I'm able to you know talk about this in a very open manner because we don't have anything you know proprietary or secret about it except the biometric deduplication so that's why I always believe that India is ready to share this because once we have done it we will be very happy and let me tell you you know this is one of the most cost-effective stuff you can do and you can improve your entire public service delivery system today our is at the center of India's public service delivery reforms and systems so Dr. Sharma that leads me to a very important question you said you're now ready to share your experiences with the rest of the world now in the US we've been struggling with the issue of identity management and authentication I know you know the US because you you've got a master that you see riverside so what advice would you give us in the US at this point well let me let me be very frank and I don't know whether you like this or not no please please be very frank my sense is look Aadhaar is not for every country in the world or Aadhaar type of a structure is not for everybody you must have a problem to solve for example we had the problem of people without any identity document I'm not sure whether the problem is so you know big in US or in Western Europe or in many other developed countries but developed nations who actually have to start having for example you have national identity because a number in Britain you have other numbers so so broadly everybody's counted there in some sense so unless you are having people who are below the radar or who don't have identity you really don't have that problem similarly we had the problem of huge leakers is taking place because of the duplicates and course and I'm not sure whether you have that kind of massive problem in the United States so my sense is that unless you have a problem to solve you should not try to solve it I mean you should not try to solve it Dr. Sherman let me ask you and then I'll get I want to ask you about healthcare in a second but let me follow up on my question let's say in the US the number of people without banking affiliation I don't know it's maybe 15% or so however cyber security is a gigantic issue and you know based on my work at MIT and other places security and identity are closely intertwined correct so we may not have quite the inclusiveness issue but we have a gigantic cyber security issue can you just say a few words about ATHAR and its application to cyber security and next I want to ask you about ATHAR and its application to improve access to healthcare okay so first cyber security then access to healthcare if you may no I fully agree with you that cyber security is an extremely extremely important threat and one has to be extremely conscious of it so what we have done is a we have taken all these steps and of course we continue to take all the steps to secure ATHAR database that's one part because that's in our domain so one is that we have a fraud management system at the back end because a huge number of authentications are taking place every second so we are having those systems as to you know if somebody is authenticating from place X and next moment he authenticates from place Y and X and Y are so distant that the guy cannot be at two places at the same time then you know we kind of catch him so those systems are being deployed number one, number two we are using encryptions and other kinds of policies so when you unload for ATHAR your data gets encrypted in the last eight or nine years that ATHAR has been in existence there has not been a single instance of any biometric data having been leaked and we keep the biometric data offline which means at the back end when authentication takes place it's actually the minutiae of the features of these biometrics which are participating in this authentication and not the biometric itself number one, number two we have that DSN no system you know if you're authenticating if you're either the authenticating response is yes or it is no we don't disclose any information so many of these you know security and privacy aspects have been built built into the design of the project so that's one part I agree with you that other domains have to be careful other domains with interface with ATHAR ATHAR has insulated itself in the sense that the interface with the other domains is only through a well-defined protocol and we don't get more information than what is required and we don't disclose information than what is not required by then so essentially authentication as a service so we don't for example know what is the purpose of the authentication and that's that actually ensures privacy because it's a structure also you provide excuse me the ATHAR service provides to the private sector authentication as a service is that correct yes it does that's very impressive that I am very impressed I don't want to run out of time to ask you this very important question from Matthew Reeve which is if you can talk about how ATHAR will or already being used to improve access to healthcare in India I think what is happening is that there are a number of healthcare schemes which provide subsidies or help to the poor people so essentially at that point if you are eligible then when you go to a hospital in order to ensure that only you get the service and nobody else proxies for you the ATHAR authentication is used so essentially ATHAR can provide service to any domain which is interested in identity verification and authentication health is one such domain and to in fact a couple of months back our prime minister our prime minister has launched a very very massive program virtually covering about half the population of India into universal kind of health coverage which is called Aishman Bharat and there we are developing what we call India health stack and I can probably forward that document to you essentially as to what will be the health stack what will be the diagnostics the service providers and how do you create a registry of that so that of course is not directly related to ATHAR because ATHAR provides only authentic services but we have built similar to ATHAR similar to UPI we have built what is called India health stack so that describes various health related technology artifacts and documents Excellent Chris would you like to ask your question Yes thank you Irving and Dr. Sharma thank you very much for your time and excellent presentation I have two questions one is you chose to make ATHAR voluntary I would like to know what were the pluses the benefits and the drawbacks of that decision of making ATHAR voluntary as opposed to mandatory and tell me about the Supreme Court's decision are there things that you were doing last week with ATHAR that you based upon the decision will no longer be able to do next week I think these are excellent questions Chris and let me first tell you to this issue of voluntary versus mandatory so we issued a broad strategy paper as long back as in August of 2009 thereby we called creating unique identity for a billion Indians and there we deliberately said that if you know because it's an identity without eligibility so if that means identity which does not provide any kind of assurances what you will get what you will not get so we said look if you make it compulsory or if you make it mandatory this will not be acceptable to the people so let those people come first who don't have any ID papers and who need identity let people come and get this document otherwise if you do this mandatory business then what will happen is that you know you have to have the approximate facilities to do that and you know you have to have a timetable to complete that anybody not there you will have to punish it you will have to notice him and all that stuff so we didn't want to get into that route however in the document we have said that while ATHAR is voluntary if any domain for example any subsidy delivering agency if it wants to make it compulsory for their own domain they may do so at their own convenience and time which means that suppose I've got 100 beneficiaries and if 95 of them already has ATHAR number then I can say look I will provide you you know these services only after verification of your identity that those five guys who don't have the IDs please you know get yourself registered so you don't go to the entire mandatory stuff for the entire population you can actually keep on mandating it from domain to domain from sector to sector from department to department so that's one part secondly the question you know we are still studying that that judgment of the ultimate supreme court which actually came last you know about 24 hours back that judgment runs into 1500 pages 1448 to be more precise and and there's a dissenting judgment so one judgment is four judges you know three judges one judgment one judge another judgment which concurs with these three judges and the fifth judge is dissenting so all these we are studying but broad part is there's a section in the ATHAR Act called section 57 which actually says that it can be used by corporate and private entities and you know you asked that question just now that whether ATHAR is being used for private but private entities or not and I answered that in yes but there is some doubt now because whether the private entities can insist on ATHAR A and whether they can use the authentication service of ATHAR is another question however the supreme court has left a caveat saying that if the government thinks that these entities should use ATHAR government can actually incorporate that into the law so for example you know income tax there's a money laundering act and income tax you know says that we should use ATHAR and therefore that is covered so that is incentive but banking for example banking maybe there's no regulation or there's no rule which says that you should mentally verify your identity through ATHAR so maybe they will have to put in some regulation so essential idea is that each sector regulator or each department will have to ensure that they have a proper legal backing to actually utilize the system that's the difference which has happened and I'm sure the government is cognizant of the fact because today itself I'm a telecom regulator and my telecom companies are now saying look our cost of customer acquisition will go 10 times because currently we are acquiring a customer and just about 2-3 cents US cents and tomorrow our customer acquisition cost will go 2 dollars so it is it is going to be huge so now you know what do we do because today they are using electronic KYC tomorrow they will use those the paper documents so so I think you know we are still studying the judgment and there are certain sectors for which we already have the law there may be certain sectors for which we don't have the law or regulation law does not mean a law related by parliament law also means some of the legislation by the regulators like like TRAI so I think that's that's what it is but it's too early really to give a definitive answer to your question because we are still studying the judgment but we are very sure whatever the judgment is because the judgment very clearly says that you can have you can do this with a legal backing and that I think sectors will be able to do it thank you very much and Dr. Sharma I want to thank you as well we've run out of time we really appreciate this it was a fascinating presentation and we'll remind our viewers that you can download the recording on our CGE YouTube channel and I know there's been a request for some copies of the slides so we will send them out if that's okay with you that's okay with me excellent thank you very much for your time we really appreciate it thank you very much friends it has been wonderful talking to you and you know sort of I feel so passionately about this project and what it has done to the country and therefore I feel a pleasure in you know kind of sharing this with all of you thank you very much thank you thank you bye bye