New Delhi: After the working Group of Ministers’ proposal on employment generation is implemented, India could soon have a ‘One Nation, One Address’, related to an Aadhaar number, for every property.Guided by Social Justice and Empowerment Minister Thaawar Chand Gehlot, the operating GoM on employment generation and skill development proposed its report to Prime Minister Narendra Modi last month which said a unique, digital and scalable addressing solution for streets, buildings and units is needed.
Describing how the system will function, the report presented determining and sequentially numbering streets using a fixed alphanumeric format. For instance, in a code like ‘AGC – 270 – 234’, AGC would be the province code/village code, tracked by the street number (270) and the house number (234).The report noted another example of this form, which was the New Delhi Municipal Council’s idea and has already experimented it out.
“STS 100 138 instead of Mahaveer Shiva Shakti Mandir, Airport Authority of India, Safdarjung Airport Road, Satya Sadan, New Delhi, NCT of Delhi, 110003”.
There are challenges to this approach, which the report pointed out about 90 per cent of India’s streets do not have names or numbers, and addresses are in various formats.“In recent decades, both urban and rural India has experienced extremely rapid growth. This growth has created many underserviced neighbourhoods. The street identification systems initially used in old neighbourhoods in the city/village centres have rarely been extended to new ones. Inadequate identification systems have created a worrisome predicament for urban and rural services,” the report noted.
- With no course of street coordinates, how do you find your way around a continuously growing city/village?
- How do we guarantee ambulance/police reach on time?
- How can public and private services be supplied in time and efficiently?
- How do you identify breakdowns in water, electricity, and internet?
- How do you establish an efficient tax collection procedure?”
A senior government official told: “It is calculated that many delivery persons waste 20% of their time locating the address and end up calling the person. Even drone delivery is not feasible in India as there is no unique number in India for houses and properties. If we execute ‘One nation, One Address’, not only will it make delivery more efficient, but it will also help other key areas such as fire, ambulance and property tax among others.”
If implemented, the system is also likely to form an estimated 2 crore jobs in the next five years in sectors such as the gig economy, surface transport, logistics, healthcare, hyper-local markets, and government services delivered to the doorstep, with momentum on women micro-entrepreneurs. At the same time, it is possible to cost around Rs 1,125 crore (Rs 562 crore in year one and Rs 563 crore in year two).
The report added that this would lead to advanced financial and administrative efficiencies across sectors, from property taxation, emergency retort and disaster management, town and country planning and waste management to election management, resentment redressals, infrastructure planning, and administration and social transfers among others.
The report also documents the process of implementation, which comprises of data collection, digitizing current imagery, auto-identification of roads from imagery (satellite and drone imagery), digitization of wards/village boundaries, the labeling of localities, city, village, locality code generation, unique street number generation, digital door number generation, a survey by Census or IndiaPost, affixing stickers and digital door number generation among others.
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