The customer, a leading democracy, needed a mechanism that uniquely identifies each person and ensures instant identity verification. Here, the inability to prove one’s identity is one of the biggest barriers preventing the poor from accessing benefits and subsidies. Public and private sector agencies across the country require proof of identity to provide individuals with services. As a result, every time individuals try to access a service, they have to undergo the complete cycle of identity verification. In addition, numerous service providers differ in terms of the documents they demand. This is especially unfair to the country’s underprivileged residents living in remote locations. They usually lack documents and find it diffcult to meet the costs of multiple verification processes. The need to prove identity only once would reduce their transaction costs. The identity number would enable delivery of social welfare programs to communities that are, at present, denied such benefits due to their lack of identification. It would also help track whether the intended beneficiaries actually receive the funds / subsidies.
Business challenge
Being a first-of-its kind venture comes with various challenges – technological, political, social, and logistical. Hence, future implications should be taken into account early in the system design process. They include the following:
- Designing a future proof, scalable and adaptable enrolment solution.
- Ensuring quality of resident data captured through the system.
- Developing efficiency in the data capture process.
- Creating consistency and standardization in the data capture and transfer processes.
Our solution
- Designed to run on both automatic and manual mode, requiring minimal intervention from the operator.
- Designed to ensure quick and correct data entry leveraging, to intelligently pre-populate data.
- Allows users to avoid repeat data entry for address and other information, from residents who visit the enrolment center in groups or from the same locality.
- System design supports quick data entry for both structured urban addresses and unstructured rural addresses.
- Offers data capture in local languages and allows operators to automatically transliterate in local languages. In addition, it can modify the transliterated version if required.
- System features an inbuilt learning dictionary.
Our approach
To design and deliver the enrolment services to the residents, our qualitative design research team studied the interactions between the residents (applicants) and the staff at the enrolment centers. The research focused on the resident’s exchange of instructions and information, with different devices and physical infrastructure at these centers. The observations helped us:
- Garner user insights to exploit design opportunities and improve the overall resident experience at the enrolment center.
- Enhance operational efficiencies of the enrolment processes.
The research used for the above was:
- Photo elicitation as the key observational data collection method along with in-depth user interview.
- Usability analysis to understand shortcomings of the user interface of the enrolment process.
Business impact
- Successfully launched the enrolment and authentication service, generating over 400 million numbers till date.
- Public and private sectors partnered to deliver a bouquet of services to enrolled residents. This facilitated easy and efficient delivery of government services to the rural population.
