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

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 world.