A digital vision for India

Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations

By Nandan Nilekani and Viral Shah, Allen Lane, 368 pages, £20

The energetic Nandan Nilekani, co-founder of the Indian information technology group Infosys and inspiration for the idea that the “world is flat”, is a better digital evangelist than politician.

He lost heavily when he stood for the Congress party in the Bengaluru South constituency in 2014, swept away in the “Modi wave” that brought Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata party to power in the general election. Nilekani’s legacies to India — not only the foundation of an IT services industry in the 1980s, but also the current programme to give every Indian a biometrically verified digital identity — nevertheless remained intact.

There was a moment after Modi’s triumph when it looked as if the new government might spitefully dump the “Aadhaar” (a Hindi word meaning “foundation” or “base”) identity programme that Nilekani had launched under the previous Congress administration. But the obvious benefits for India’s 1.3 billion people, and for those chosen to govern them, saw reason prevail.

Rebooting India is a manifesto for Aadhaar — once described as “the biggest social project on the planet” — and all the ways that such digital technology is being or could be deployed to manage this notoriously ill-managed country better, whether the challenge is banking, education, the courts or taxation.

Viral Shah, Nilekani’s co-author, is a software expert and co-inventor of the “Julia” programming language. He had been living in Santa Barbara, California, “surfing, playing Ultimate Frisbee, nursing a serious burrito habit and working for a Boston-based start-up” when he met Nilekani and joined the project soon after its launch in 2009.

The two digital entrepreneurs lay out an extraordinarily ambitious — some would say naive — agenda for changing the way India functions, using IT to increase transparency, collect and analyse data and reduce corruption. “We propose that a team of 100 carefully selected individuals can fix all the major problems that ail India,” they write. The idea is that the prime minister identifies 10 grand challenges, each of which is tackled by a 10-member start-up team within government.

The officials in charge of such projects “need to display a considerable amount of entrepreneurial savvy”, they say in their introduction. That is some understatement, for the person responsible “will navigate the byways of the bureaucracy, keep his multiple masters happy, get his project mentioned in every important speech and every government document of relevance, get his bills tabled in Parliament and enacted as law, secure his budgets, co-operate with investigating agencies ...” — the list goes on.

This could all be dismissed as pie in the sky, were the challenges facing a modernising India not so serious, and had the country not already begun to use the 12-digit Aadhaar numbers already in the possession of more than 900 million people to advance some of the proposals discussed — notably in electronic banking for the poor, and to ensure that cooking gas subsidies reach those in need.

No one can deny that India has severe governance problems. Even the much-lauded Election Commission, which oversees electronic voting in the world’s largest democracy, needs to clean the electoral rolls. The authors mention the discovery of more than 1 million mistakes in the rolls for the state of Karnataka (of which Bengaluru is the capital), including hundreds of thousands of voters with multiple records in different constituencies, and one man aged “4,818”.

India’s justice system is also “in trouble”, with 30 million cases pending as of 2014, and thus qualifies as a candidate for an emergency infusion of IT data solutions. One high-court judge estimated that even if the judiciary decided today to tackle all pending cases, it would take 320 years to clear the backlog. Education is even worse. Last year, when the state of Maharashtra (with close to 120 million inhabitants) tested 400,000 primary and upper primary schoolteachers, only 1 per cent of the primary teachers and 5 per cent of those for upper primary passed the examination.

The very launch of Aadhaar by Nilekani and his team suggests that radical change in India using IT is at least possible, and the most compelling parts of the book are the early chapters describing how this was achieved and how some benefits have already been felt.

It turned out to be easier than expected to persuade Indians to give their fingerprints and iris data in exchange for a unique lifetime identity number and a new card, in some cases the fourth in an array of government cards carried by Indians. “Idiot, if I have three buffaloes, and the government is giving me a fourth, won’t I stand in line?” a waiting villager told one of the volunteers enrolling people for the project.

Thanks to Aadhaar, the government will be able to send targeted subsidies for fertiliser, fuel and food — they amount to some $46 billion (Dh169 billion) a year — direct to the intended recipients, bypassing corrupt middlemen. It should be possible for villagers anywhere, meanwhile, to receive such subsidies or pension payments in their bank accounts (instead of spending hours travelling to a bank branch), and withdraw money near their homes using “microATMs”.

Nilekani and Shah want to go further, with road pricing, smart grids and even a government Expenditure Information Network (EIN) so that citizens can see exactly where their taxes are spent. Like Modi himself, though, they have found that the next phase of radical change is hard to enact, perhaps because everything that widening the use of Aadhaar would mean — transparency, simplicity and speed — is anathema to corrupt bureaucrats and politicians.

“In the years since the proposal for an EIN was first made, there has been very little progress towards implementation,” they write, abandoning their optimism just this once and joining the complaints of the Indians they are trying to help, those who have “a billion voices unheard and a billion frustrations unresolved”.

–Financial Times