How Estonia is plotting to end bureaucracy

TALLINN: In the Estonian capital of Tallinn, three-day-old Oskar Lunde sleeps soundly in his hospital cot, snuggled into a blanket. Across the room, his father turns on a laptop. “Now we will register our child,” Andrejs Lunde says as he inserts his ID card into the card reader. And just like that, Oskar is Estonia’s newest citizen. No paper. No fuss.
This Baltic nation is engaged in an ambitious project to make government administration completely digital to reduce bureaucracy, increase transparency and boost economic growth.

Need a prescription? It’s online. Need someone at City Hall? No lines there. On the school front, parents can see whether their children’s homework was done on time. Estonia has created one platform that supports electronic authentication and digital signatures to enable paperless communications across both the private and public sectors.

There are still a few things that you can’t do electronically in Estonia: marry, divorce or transfer property only because the government has decided it was important to turn up in person for some big life events.

This spring, government aims to go further. If Oskar had been born a few months later, he would have been registered automatically, with his parents receiving an email welcoming him into the nation.

Marten Kaevats, Estonia’s national digital adviser, says the goal is a government that supports its citizens while staying out of the way.

Citizens can monitor their data and see if any government or private institution accesses it. “To generate trust, you have to have transparency,” project manager Indrek Onnik said. “And that’s why people have access to their own data. They can actually see if the government has used their own data.”

The platform is underpinned by software called X- Road, a decentralised data exchange system that links databases. Outgoing data is digitally signed and encrypted, and all incoming data is authenticated and logged.

The government, fearing attempts to compromise its borders by neighbouring Russia, has a backup plan to restore digital services in the event of invasion or cyberattacks.

The project, which began in 1997, laid the groundwork for Estonia’s booming tech sector. Skype, the video-calling service Microsoft bought for $8.5 billion in 2011, is Estonia’s most famous high-tech export, but the impact is broader. Information and communications accounted for 5.9% of the economy last year.

The government hopes to increase that figure with an “eresidency” programme that lets entrepreneurs register businesses in Estonia and gain a foothold in the European Union. More than 51,000 people from 167 countries have applied at a cost of €100 ($114) each.

Whether Estonia’s system can be used in larger countries is an open question, said Zvika Krieger, head of technology policy at the World Economic Forum. What works in a small, progressive country won’t necessarily work in sprawling democracies like the US or India. But Andrejs Lunde says digital government makes life so easy that it’s worth any security risk. “If someone wants my information, they will get it anyway. If they can get Hillary’s emails, they can get mine.”