Harris Voices: Reimagining Aadhar as One of the World’s Largest Behavioral Experiments

Shortly before she passed away last spring, Cheistha Kochhar, MAIDP'20, a Harris School of Public Policy alumna and former employee, began writing a series of articles on her behavioral strategy work, both as Senior Advisor for NITI Aayog's National Behavioral Insights Unit of India, and as a Doctoral Candidate with the London School of Economics and Political Science. The intention was to share her articles as part of a series on behavioral science. We have gained permission from her family to share her articles in her memory.

Aadhar, recognized as the world's largest technology project, represents a groundbreaking endeavor to provide a biometric digital identity to 1.7 billion people in India. It stands out not only for its ambitious goal, but also for its robust and scalable technology, drawing global attention and study. Furthermore, Aadhar's creation highlights a unique governance mechanism, an orchestrated blend of the best professionals from the public and private sectors. Aadhar also serves as the foundational layer of India Stack, which refers to a comprehensive digital public infrastructure. This infrastructure underpins several public products that serve billions of people worldwide, emphasizing the global impact of Aadhar's technology.

Despite its recognition as the world's largest digital project and a unique model of public-private partnership, Aadhar's story encompasses more than just these achievements. Its widespread acceptance by 1.7 billion people of India as a form of identity also represents perhaps the world's largest behavioral experiment, a narrative that has remained untold.

We may understand a small but significant part of this experiment through the example of how Aadhar was delivered, discussed below.

Aadhar was conceived as a 12-digit, randomly generated unique identity number for every resident of India, authenticated against their biometric data. While this number could have been simply communicated through an SMS or a bulletin board for those without access to mobiles, it was instead delivered through a physical letter. This letter included a small tear-away portion at the bottom, which was in the dimensions of an identity card and contained the Aadhar number.

The decision to deliver Aadhar through a letter and in this format may seem trivial against all other monumental aspects of Aadhar, but it could be argued that it was the fundamental behavioral intervention that led to the adoption of Aadhar amongst 1.7 billion people.

In India, there is a prevalent mental model wherein identity is attached to a physical card. In other words, the concept of identity is intuitively linked to a tangible card in the minds of most Indian individuals. Delivering Aadhar as just a number would have caused mental dissonance with the recipient’s understanding of identity. This dissonance would likely lead to confusion about the nature of Aadhar, with citizens viewing it as a random number with uncertain utility.

Mental models are powerful in shaping our perception and interaction with the world. For instance, if our mental model defines a chair as a cushion with four legs, it becomes challenging to accept an object without legs as a chair. Similarly, in the context of Aadhar, when people have historically associated identity with a physical object like a paper or card, a purely digital identity like a number could create cognitive conflict and lead to the rejection of that identity.

Aadhar's technical robustness and unique value proposition may have failed at the very beginning if this fundamental aspect of human cognition had not been recognized. By simply presenting the number in the form of a card, Aadhar successfully resonated with people’s mental model of an identity, thus laying strong foundations for the widescale adoption of Aadhar as an identity. The only critical element on that tear-away piece of paper was the 12-digit number, but its presentation as a card enabled its acceptance as a form of identity.

This subtle yet crucial aspect of Aadhar's design underscores an important lesson for other large-scale public services across the world: the need to consider human behavior in the design and delivery of large-scale public services. Today, the pervasive presence of Aadhar in every aspect of life in India is a potent reminder that people cannot be an afterthought in public service design and delivery.

The success of Aadhar illustrates the importance of integrating behavioral insights into the most seemingly minor steps in policy design and implementation and ensuring that technological advancements align with the cognitive and cultural contexts of their intended users.