How Aadhaar has mobilised technology at the grass-root level in India

The system has significantly improved financial inclusion, access to public documents and services, tax compliance, retail payments and the management of government subsidies

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