'Smart address' gaining traction in India, but mass adoption may take time

MapMyIndia, an online maps company, has launched a free app called the eLoC Standard Digital Address System to generate digital addresses

If you stroll along the lanes of central Bengaluru, you might come across some yellow address plates at the entrance of offices and residences. These aren’t standard address plates, though. They bear a nine-digit numeric code, or a digital address, that not only carries the regular-format address and name of the resident, but also the exact latitude and longitude coordinates of the location. 

These smart address plates are being provided by EasyZip, a Bengaluru-based firm, which is one among several outfits leading the charge to digitise Indian addresses that are often lengthy and imprecise. When you share your smart address code with anyone, all he or she has to do is click on it on a smartphone, and it automatically opens into Google Maps with the route laid out. 

“The core idea is to be able to share and search an address in the simplest manner,” says Atul Prabhu, co-founder, EasyZip, which also generates smart address codes via an app.  “Eventually, we want to open this to emergency services, the police and the fire department, so that these agencies can reach the distress location faster,” he adds.

For Vasu Agarwal, a designer based in Bengaluru, smart addresses app Zippr has become his virtual address book. “Whenever I go to someone’s house or office for the first time, I use the Zippr app to generate a code and save it on Zippr itself. That’s my address book now,” he says.  

MapMyIndia, an online maps company, has also launched a free app called the eLoC Standard Digital Address System to generate digital addresses.

Needless to say, accurate addresses are of enormous importance to delivery and courier companies. Annually, imperfect addresses lead to a loss of about $10-14 billion to industries, according to a 2018 study on the subject by MIT Labs, a  research wing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US.  

The study notes that 30-40 per cent people write the wrong pin-code. Even if it is correct, a pin-code typically covers an area of 179 sq. km with about 135,000 households and over 100,000 businesses.

To tackle this problem, delivery companies such as Amazon Transportation Services, Delhivery or Ekart are now creating their own repository of digital addresses. Once goods are delivered at a particular location, the delivery firm saves the precise doorstep location into a digital code.  

“Addresses are the single-most important customer input for Amazon to make fast and reliable deliveries. And a poor quality address often leads to delayed or even failed deliveries,” says an Amazon India spokesperson. “To address this challenge in India, we have been using machine learning techniques to validate customer addresses, compute address quality scores and correct pin-code mismatches,” he adds. 

However, it is not always possible to manually survey and record addresses. Delhivery, an e-commerce-focussed logistics firm, has an internal system called AddFix that uses machine learning to determine the exact locations of the millions of unstructured addresses it receives every day. 

“Graphical models churn millions of customer address records in an unsupervised way to learn the names of cities, localities, sub-localities, building names and POIs (proof of identity) that exist in a given geographical region, along with their hierarchical relations and alternative spellings. This essentially generates a graph consisting of different locality features that people commonly write in addresses,” Delhivery’s lead data scientist Kabir Rustogi explains in his Medium blog.

As a result, claims Delhivery, it is able to pin-point an address within a median precision of 200m radius.

However, industry experts say that as of now, there are too many hurdles in the way of mass adoption of smart addresses. The main problem is inter-operability. Today, people are using different apps to generate their own digital addresses. But each has a different format and typically works only in its own ecosystem. For example, if you are using a Zippr smart address, it doesn’t make sense to share it with someone who is using EasyZip. 

Besides, delivery companies, which have the biggest trove of addresses data, are building their own proprietary digital addresses in complete isolation from their peers.

The Smart Cities project could make a difference here. “It presents a major opportunity to implement smart digital addresses on a mass scale,” asserts Rakesh Verma, chairman and managing director, MapMyIndia. 

Last year, MapMyIndia conducted a pilot with the Department of Posts to determine the feasibility of converting standard addresses to the digital format using its app, eLoC. However, Arundhaty Ghosh, Member, operations, at the Department of Posts, says the project is still at a rudimentary stage.

Hence, though digital addresses would increase efficiency all around, without a standard framework akin to, say, Aadhaar, its benefits will not trickle down in a holistic fashion. As Verma of MapMyIndia points out, unless there is a central agency that directs people and businesses to adopt smart addresses, their mass proliferation will be slow. 

Cryptic code

Alpha-numeric codes called 'Smart Address' may soon replace standard four-line addresses 

Smart address is a unique code that carries the owner's credentials and the precise lat-long coordinates of the location

Easy to share, record and spell out

Smart Addresses are also readable by machines allowing companies to better record and analyse address data

Apps like Zippr, EasyZip and LinCodes let users create their own digital address

Delivery and couriers companies are assigning digital codes to addresses in their database, leading to reduction in delivery costs and slippages