Prioritizing Digital Identity Goals – The Case Study of Aadhaar in India

Identity is one of the basic building blocks of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and as the capability of digital technologies improves drastically in the last decade, identity in digital form has become unavoidable. Identity entitles an individual to various services like voting, education, employment, insurance, healthcare etc. Yet there are around 1 billion people in the world at present that do not possess any form of official identity. Lack of identity has a significant impact on people living in rural areas, especially women, children, and financially backward families. In recently released Sustainable Development Goal-16 by the UN, it has been recommended that by 2030, every individual should be given a legal identity. India’s digital identity program –Aadhaar is one significant contribution in this direction considering its coverage. Rolling out a national identity scheme needs a considerable budget, time and most importantly, domain knowledge for smooth implementation. This paper attempts to identify the overarching goals of Aadhaar. The study also ranks goals based on their significance. The research uses focus group for data collection along with secondary data. The research in total identified nine primary goals with uniqueness, privacy and security as the high priority goals and scalability and future-proofing of technology as low priority goals. Total Interpretive Structural Modeling (TISM) has been used to identify the significance of each goal. This study could be taken as a starting point by other nations that are desirous of having a similar biometric identity program for its citizens.