London Daily

Focus on the big picture.
Thursday, Sep 18, 2025

Covid-19 spurs national plans to give citizens digital identities

Covid-19 spurs national plans to give citizens digital identities

MOSIP, an open-source platform developed in India, will be central to many of those efforts
WHEN MILLIONS of migrant workers were forced by India’s sudden covid lockdown to return to their villages from the cities where they worked, many feared destitution. But Aadhaar, the country’s pioneering biometric ID system, came to the rescue. Under an income scheme for farmers launched in 2014 that would have been impossible without Aadhaar, $1.5bn was transferred digitally and at speed into the bank accounts of 30m people, with little waste or fraud and almost no distribution cost.

Because 1bn accounts are linked to people’s Aadhaar identity numbers, India has been able to channel help to where it has been most needed with remarkable efficiency. Contrast that with America, where 90m paper cheques were laboriously sent through the mail, accompanied by a signed letter from President Donald Trump.

Covid has had a way both of exposing the weakest links in societies and of acting as a spur to innovation. Rich countries without national digital-ID systems can scrape through, thanks to myriad other ways people have of proving who they are—driving licences, credit cards, social-security numbers and so on. But for poor countries, the problem of getting covid-related help to their most vulnerable citizens is made infinitely more difficult when you do not know who they are or what services, such as health care and income support, they are entitled to.

Around the world, 1bn people have no formal proof of identity. More than 80% of them live in sub-Saharan Africa and the less well-off parts of Asia. Less than half of African children under five have their births registered. The poorest, women and those living in rural areas are least likely to have officially recognised IDs.

Something as seemingly straightforward but critically important as a vaccination registry to record who has had a jab and who has not, is easy to set up if you have a foundational digital-ID system to build it on, but much harder if you do not. Nandan Nilekani, the co-founder of Infosys, one of India’s largest IT-consulting and systems-integration firms, and the driving force behind Aadhaar, believes that the system will be crucial to authenticating digital certificates as a proof of vaccination.

Many governments in Africa and Asia have been inspired by the success of Aadhaar, which since its inception in 2009 has enrolled 1.3bn people. It has streamlined the delivery of services and payments, cut corruption, boosted financial inclusion and hugely raised participation in India’s digital economy. Before covid struck, encouraged by the launch of World Bank’s ID4D (“Identification for Development”) programme, which started in 2014, countries such as Morocco, the Philippines and Myanmar went to Delhi in search of help. But there is now a new sense of urgency.

However, Aadhaar is a complex system with its own set of application program interfaces, known as the India Stack, that could not easily be replicated. Having learned lessons from Aadhaar, Mr Nilekani proposed a different approach: building an open-source foundational ID platform that could be taken up by any country free of charge. The result is MOSIP, which stands for Modular Open Source Identity Platform.

With financial support from the World Bank, two countries—Morocco and the Philippines—are implementing national ID schemes based on MOSIP, which will be rolled out early next year. Three more—Ethiopia, Guinea and Sri Lanka—are working on pilots. Several others, including Ivory Coast, Togo and Tunisia, are keen on using MOSIP. There are plans for countries across west Africa to have a shared interoperable ID platform, allowing cross-border authentication. The aim is that by 2023, at least ten countries will be operating MOSIP-based digital-ID platforms and it will have become an international standard, each country having learned from the others’ deployments. And the covid emergency is lengthening the queue of countries at MOSIP’s door.

The MOSIP project, which got going in March 2018, is nested in Bangalore’s International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT-B) and endowed with funding of $16m from the Omidyar Network, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Tata Trusts. What it set out to do was to give countries with far less IT capacity than India’s a basis for establishing a cost-effective foundational identity system that was, in effect, “Aadhaar in a box”. Bangalore, according to C.V. Madhukar, Omidyar’s lead on digital identity, was the obvious place to base MOSIP. It could draw on technical know-how from Mr Nilekani’s original Aadhaar team, who were mostly still there, and on the resources of the iSPIRT Foundation, an organisation of volunteer engineers who donate their time to build software as a public good.

From the outset the MOSIP group, which is led by S. Rajagopalan, the entrepreneurial head of IIIT-B’s Innovation Centre, was clear on two points. The first was that MOSIP should be a standard-bearer for “good” digital ID. It had to be designed with a “citizen-centred” approach that ensured safety (protecting individual privacy and ensuring inclusion) and accountability (policies to limit use cases to those which are of general benefit and which cannot be perverted for purposes such as political suppression).

Countries applying to use MOSIP must assure its governing executive committee that as well as having sufficient digital infrastructure (or adequate funding to put it in place), their intentions for the system are benign and the underlying policy framework is robust. It is not a guarantee against misuse, but it is a worthy statement of principle.

The second was that MOSIP should be open-source, allowing all its protocols to be seen, developed and strengthened by collective effort. As Professor Rajagopalan says: “A lot of eyes are better than a few.” His vision is for MOSIP to become a thriving open-source project in which a community of developers and system integrators contribute to the long-term support and growth of the platform.

It was critical that implementing countries, though still needing to hire a professional systems integrator, would own the underlying identification platform including the software that supports it. Mr Madhukar notes that because national digital-ID systems are inherent monopolies, a key requirement for most countries is to avoid the perils of being locked into a single proprietary technology. MOSIP allows them to work with multiple application vendors, and remain in overall control of the system.

Because of its modular design (which separates the functions of each program into independent and interchangeable components) and configurability (which allows flexible solutions to real-world problems and simplifies deployment and maintenance), MOSIP can be adapted to different country contexts, laws and varying levels of digital infrastructure. Ease of customisation gives countries the option to pick the features they want to buy “off-the-shelf” and those they want to develop bespoke. For example, they can choose different modes of authentication, from biometrics to mobile one-time passwords.

Another big decision that MOSIP leaves to its clients is whether to go for hosting the platform on national premises or the quicker, more scalable solution of the cloud. Either way, governments, rather than a third-party outfit, will own all their own data.

Over the next year or so, says Mr Madhukar, the MOSIP team will concentrate on “handholding” implementing countries and learning from them what works (and what does not) and further developing the architecture to integrate with a wide range of commercial software producers, while still avoiding the perils of vendor lock-in.

A big challenge for the future, as the number of countries wanting to use MOSIP grows, will be the capacity of local IT talent to build on the platform and create the data application layers to ensure interoperability with national registries and services. That will require the resources to train local providers and systems integrators, while also building a small community of developers that can be parachuted in to deal with specific problems. Without additional funding from philanthropic donors and the World Bank, or more help in kind from tech giants such as Google and Amazon, those efforts will stall.

That would be a pity. Chris Yiu, who leads the technology and policy team at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, is optimistic both about what digital ID in lower-income countries can achieve and how MOSIP can help. The institute is working with Oracle, a business computing firm, to establish vaccination registries across Africa. Mr Yiu says that “covid has played a forcing function” in making countries determined to run their health-care and welfare systems more efficiently and see digital-ID systems as the vital platform for doing so.

Other good things can come from that. Well-designed digital-ID systems, he argues, play a vital role in building trust in both government-to-citizen and citizen-to-citizen transactions, each of which are crucial drivers of social capital (those networks and relationships which are the bedrock of thriving societies) and economic development.
Newsletter

Related Articles

0:00
0:00
Close
US Tech Giants Pledge Billions to UK AI Infrastructure Following Starmer's Call
Saudi Arabia cracks down on music ‘lounges’ after conservative backlash
DeepMind and OpenAI Achieve Gold at ‘Coding Olympics’ in AI Milestone
SEC Allows Public Companies to Block Investors from Class-Action Lawsuits
Saudi Arabia Signs ‘Strategic Mutual Defence’ Pact with Pakistan, Marking First Arab State to Gain Indirect Access to Nuclear Strike Capabilities in the Region
Federal Reserve Cuts Rates by Quarter Point and Signals More to Come
Effective and Impressive Generation Z Protest: Images from the Riots in Nepal
European manufacturers against ban on polluting cars: "The industry may collapse"
Sam Altman sells the 'Wedding Estate' in Hawaii for 49 million dollars
Trump: Cancel quarterly company reports and settle for reporting once every six months
Turkish car manufacturer Togg Enters German Market with 5-Star Electric Sedan and SUV to Challenge European EV Brands
US Launches New Pilot Program to Accelerate eVTOL Air Taxi Deployment
Christian Brueckner Released from German Prison after Serving Unrelated Sentence
World’s Longest Direct Flight China Eastern to Launch 29-Hour Shanghai–Buenos Aires Direct Flight via Auckland in December
New OpenAI Study Finds Majority of ChatGPT Use Is Personal, Not Professional
Hong Kong Industry Group Calls for HK$20 Billion Support Fund to Ease Property Market Stress
Joe Biden’s Post-Presidency Speaking Fees Face Weak Demand amid Corporate Reluctance
Charlie Kirk's murder will break the left's hateful cancel tactics
Kash Patel erupts at ‘buffoon’ Sen. Adam Schiff over Russiagate: ‘You are the biggest fraud’
Homeland Security says Emmy speech ‘fanning the flames of hatred’ after Einbinder’s ‘F— ICE’ remark
Charlie Kirk’s Alleged Assassin Tyler Robinson Faces Death Penalty as Charges Formally Announced
Actor, director, environmentalist Robert Redford dies at 89
The conservative right spreads westward: a huge achievement for 'Alternative for Germany' in local elections
JD Vance Says There Is “No Unity” with Those Who Celebrate Charlie Kirk’s Killing, and he is right!
Trump sues the 'New York Times' for an astronomical sum of 15 billion dollars
Florida Hospital Welcomes Its Largest-Ever Baby: Annan, Nearly Fourteen Pounds at Birth
U.S. and Britain Poised to Finalize Over $10 Billion in High-Tech, Nuclear and Defense Deals During Trump State Visit
China Finds Nvidia Violated Antitrust Laws in Mellanox Deal, Deepens Trade Tensions with US
US Air Force Begins Modifications on Qatar-Donated Jet Amid Plans to Use It as Air Force One
Pope Leo Warns of Societal Crisis Over Mega-CEO Pay, Citing Tesla’s Proposed Trillion-Dollar Package
Poland Green-Lights NATO Deployment in Response to Major Russian Drone Incursion
Elon Musk Retakes Lead as World’s Richest After Brief Ellison Surge
U.S. and China Agree on Framework to Shift TikTok to American Ownership
London Daily Podcast: London Massive Pro Democracy Rally, Musk Support, UK Economic Data and Premier League Results Mark Eventful Weekend
This Week in AI: Meta’s Superintelligence Push, xAI’s Ten Billion-Dollar Raise, Genesis AI’s Robotics Ambitions, Microsoft Restructuring, Amazon’s Million-Robot Milestone, and Google’s AlphaGenome Update
Le Pen Tightens the Pressure on Macron as France Edges Toward Political Breakdown
Musk calls for new UK government at huge pro-democracy rally in London, but Britons have been brainwashed to obey instead of fighting for their human rights
Elon Musk responds to post calling for the murder of Erika Kirk, widow of Charlie Kirk: 'Either we fight back or they will kill us'
Czech Republic signs €1.34 billion contract for Leopard 2A8 main battle tanks with delivery from 2028
USA: Office Depot Employees Refused to Print Poster in Memory of Charlie Kirk – and Were Fired
Proposed U.S. Bill Would Allow Civil Suits Against Judges Who Release Repeat Violent Offenders
Penske Media Sues Google Over “AI Overviews,” Claiming It Uses Journalism Without Consent and Destroys Traffic
Indian Student Engineers Propose “Project REBIRTH” to Protect Aircraft from Crashes Using AI, Airbags and Smart Materials
French Debt Downgrade Piles Pressure on Macron’s New Prime Minister
US and UK Near Tech, Nuclear and Whisky Deals Ahead of Trump Trip
One in Three Europeans Now Uses TikTok, According to the Chinese Tech Giant
Could AI Nursing Robots Help Healthcare Staffing Shortages?
NATO Deploys ‘Eastern Sentry’ After Russian Drones Violate Polish Airspace
Anesthesiologist Left Operation Mid-Surgery to Have Sex with Nurse
Tens of Thousands of Young Chinese Get Up Every Morning and Go to Work Where They Do Nothing
×