Economic Impact of Discoverability of Localities and Addresses in India

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.