What is the right addressing scheme for India?
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Computer generated addresses are coming to your neighborhood because most places in the world do not have an assigned meaningful street address. In India, 80 typically lies between 50-1500 meters of the actual address; such addresses make geolocating very challenging. Accuracy in geolocation is critical for emergency services to navigate quickly to reach you and for logistics industries to improve on-time performance and efficient routing of the package coming to your house. In this paper, we explore suggested addressing schemes for India, to determine what use cases and potential technologies will have the best adoption and therefore, greatest impact. Currently, there is a rush to use machine generated codes such as 4ZXR3B (eLoc) or CAFE0098 (Zippr). These methods have proven to work in a few ways, but such systems can be confusing for the adoptee and there are technical drawbacks as well. It is critical that India adopts the most effective scheme and not the scheme that is most readily available or has the largest company behind it. We ask: What are the requirements for machine codes so that they are easy for a layman, easy for a service company (eCommerce, taxi etc) and suitable for computer systems? Here we review the desired features, compare various solutions, and suggest a path for widespread adoption of machine codes in India.
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