Economic Impact of Discoverability of Localities and Addresses in India

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how poor address discoverability in India hampers economic growth, especially in logistics and financial sectors, costing billions annually and highlighting the need for modernized addressing systems.

Contribution

It quantifies the economic impact of address discoverability issues in India and emphasizes the urgency for innovative solutions to modernize addressing systems.

Findings

India loses $10-14 billion annually due to poor address discoverability

Address discoverability affects logistics and financial services significantly

Modernizing address systems can improve economic efficiency

Abstract

Most of the earth's population has a poorly defined addressing system, thus having a poorly discoverable residence, property or business locations on a map. Easily discoverable addresses are important for improving their livelihood, business-incomes, and even service delivery. The economic cycle based on discoverable addresses is self-reinforcing: consumers independently identify and adopt such addresses according to their own convenience and businesses use algorithms or third-party services to resolve these addresses into geocodes to help better identify their customers' locations. Our paper analyses from the top two industries in India: Logistics and Financial Services, indicate that the lack of a good addressing system costs India $10-14B annually. As the Indian economy is expected to grow rapidly, the businesses would proportionately grow, causing the total costs to grow further. We, therefore, need to consider a dramatically new approach to modernize the addressing systems to bring in efficiency.