Imagine for a moment that you are one of the estimated one billion people in the world—most of them among the poorest and the most vulnerable—who have no official identification. No birth certificates. No official ID documents. Nothing.
Without a way to prove who you are, you would face huge problems going to school, seeing a doctor, receiving government services, getting a bank account, finding a job, traveling across a border, or having access to many other rights and services most of us take for granted. Without an ID, you would be nameless in the eyes of the government and largely ignored.
For the last decade, Nandan Nilekani has been working to make these “invisible people,” as he calls them, visible by giving them access to official identification. One of India’s leading technology entrepreneurs, Nandan joined the government of India to lead the launch of India’s national biometric ID system, which uses fingerprints and other biological traits to verify the identities of the country’s more than 1.3 billion residents.
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